We’re pleased to announce the rollout of our new WordPress hosting platform for Business and Enterprise customers.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been carefully migrating websites onto the new infrastructure, with the majority of websites already moved and the remaining migrations scheduled to be completed this week.
Our new platform is powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and hosted within Oracle’s UK South (London) data centre. Oracle operates one of the world’s leading cloud computing platforms, with data centres across 28 countries and a growing presence in the UK, including a recently announced $5 billion investment in UK cloud infrastructure.
By moving to Oracle’s data centres, we’re giving our Business and Enterprise customers access to the same class of technology trusted by some of the UK’s largest organisations and public sector bodies, including the UK government.
This is the most significant upgrade to our hosting platform in many years. Combined with our rollout of Cloudflare protection, the new platform has been designed to deliver faster performance, stronger security and greater reliability for busy and growing websites, and provide a strong foundation for the future.
Why are we making this change?
When dot create was founded in 2010, the internet looked very different to the one we know today. Most websites were relatively simple brochure-style sites with a handful of pages and modest visitor numbers.
As the web evolved, so did the demands placed on hosting infrastructure. In 2018 we moved our WordPress hosting platform from Leeds, to a new data centre on the outskirts of London, giving customers access to faster hardware and improved connectivity. That platform has served us extremely well over the past eight years and has hosted hundreds of customer websites during that time.
Today, however, websites are working harder than ever before. Many now include interactive features, customer portals and integrations with third-party software, while e-commerce stores have evolved into powerful and increasingly complex systems. At the same time, visitor numbers have grown significantly for many of our customers, while automated traffic from search engines, bots and AI systems has increased dramatically.
In fact, the proportion of AI bot traffic reaching websites has increased by around 500% in the past year alone. These AI tools behave differently to traditional search engine crawlers, often making more frequent and resource-intensive requests, placing additional demands on hosting infrastructure.
The way websites are built, used and accessed has changed, and so have the technologies required to support them. After months of research, testing and benchmarking, we’re now moving our Business and Enterprise customers onto a new generation of hosting infrastructure designed specifically for the demands of modern WordPress websites.
Faster websites
One of the biggest benefits of the new platform is improved performance. For your visitors, webpages will load more quickly thanks to new caching technology, where multiple copies of your webpages are now stored closer to your visitors, helping pages load faster and reducing waiting time. The web servers also have extra power to handle more demanding traffic.
The new hosting platform has also been optimised for the way modern WordPress websites operate, where websites spend much of their time retrieving and processing data. Across our customers’ websites we’ve typically seen dashboard screens loading approximately 50% faster, while some websites have seen improvements of up to 90%. So this means less time waiting and a smoother editing experience.
Enhanced security and protection
Alongside the hosting upgrade, we’re also rolling out a service called Cloudflare across all Business and Enterprise hosting plans, after trialling this since last year.
Cloudflare sits in front of your website, helping filter malicious and nuisance traffic before it reaches the server. This provides an additional layer of protection against cyber attacks and spammers, and ensures your website prioritises legitimate visitors.
Cloudflare’s advanced protection systems are trusted by many of the UK’s well known brands, including The Times, BBC, Ryanair, Rightmove and Sky, amongst many others.
Better monitoring and support
The new platform also gives us access to significantly more monitoring and diagnostic information than ever before.
We now have greater visibility into website performance, error reporting and automated bot activity. This allows us to identify unusual behaviour, investigate issues more quickly, and gain a deeper understanding of how websites are performing behind-the-scenes.
Ultimately, this means we’re better equipped to keep websites running smoothly and performing at their best, allowing us to continue delivering the high level of service and proactive maintenance that our customers expect from dot create.
Looking ahead
This upgrade provides the foundation for several future improvements that we’ll be rolling out, including:
- A new, improved dashboard experience.
- Dedicated testing websites, allowing changes to be trialled before they’re published to your live website.
- For international websites, distribution of your webpages across global data centres, helping pages load faster for visitors around the world.
As always, if you have any questions about your dot create hosting, please get in touch with us.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my website still hosted in the UK?
Yes, absolutely.
Our Business and Enterprise customers’ websites are hosted within Oracle’s UK South (London) data centre, so your data remains hosted in the UK.
Our Small Business hosting packages also remain hosted in the UK, within a data centre operated by UK Dedicated in the Thames Valley – an area often referred to as Britain’s Silicon Valley!
Who are Oracle?
Oracle was founded in the 1970s and has become one of the largest companies in the world. They operate data centres across 28 countries.
Who are Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is widely regarded as the industry leader in website protection and is used by many of the world’s largest websites and online services. They have an enormous globally-distributed network to protect websites from attacks, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. And suspicious traffic can be automatically challenged or blocked before it reaches your website.
I’m interested in the technical details… why is this new hosting platform better?
Our previous WordPress hosting platform served our customers extremely well for many years and remains a reliable solution. It’s based on CloudLinux, a mature and widely used hosting platform that powers millions of websites around the world. A useful analogy is to think of it as an apartment building, where everyone lives in the same housing block, but each tenant has their own electricity and water meter.
For Business and Enterprise customers, we’ve now moved to a container-based platform using LXD technology. Rather than living in apartments within a larger building, each website now has its own detached house on the same piece of land. This provides greater isolation between websites, more dedicated server resources, and improved performance under heavy traffic. In fact, each website can now access up to 12 CPU cores and 8GB of memory – double the resources on our previous platform.
The new infrastructure also uses modern technologies including NGINX, PHP-FPM and MariaDB databases, running on high-performance AMD EPYC processors within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. These technologies are specifically designed to handle the types of workloads generated by modern WordPress websites.
Perhaps most importantly, the platform has been optimised for database performance. WordPress websites spend much of their time retrieving and processing information from databases, and our independent benchmarking showed significantly higher database throughput than our previous hosting platform. This helps websites respond more quickly, particularly when handling complex functions and larger volumes of traffic.
Our customers are now on exactly the same managed infrastructure trusted by major organisations such as McDonald’s, TripAdvisor and NASA!
How does this compare to other web hosts?
As part of our evaluation process, we carried out independent benchmarking against a number of well-known WordPress hosting platforms. The testing involved running one million WordPress processing requests and five million database operations, designed to simulate very busy workloads.
Our chosen platform delivered the strongest overall results. Compared to a leading WordPress hosting provider running on Google Cloud, it demonstrated 11x more WordPress processing capacity and 48% faster database performance.
While benchmarks never tell the whole story, the results helped confirm what we’ve seen in real-world testing: faster loading dashboards and greater capacity for demanding WordPress websites.
What about the Small Business hosting plans?
There are no changes for customers on our Small Business hosting plans, unless we’ve contacted you directly.
Our existing WordPress hosting platform remains a reliable, secure and cost-effective solution that continues to be the right fit for many smaller websites.
The new infrastructure is primarily aimed at larger, busier or more demanding websites that benefit from the additional resources, monitoring and performance capabilities available on the new platform.
If your website is growing or you’re interested in the additional features available on our Business and Enterprise plans, please get in touch and we’d be happy to discuss the options with you.
