What is all that technology hosts advertise? And what can you, the WordPress developer/designer, look for to get the best speed for your sites? Speed is of paramount importance when choosing a host. Research shows that a 1 second delay in page-loading time can cost a site 7% of conversions. (That’s $375,000/year for a site with 100,000 hits per month and an average sale of $75.) Our tests show that even some of the world’s top WordPress hosts do not have optimal speed on their home pages. In this presentation, we will give you the knowledge to do better. We will take you through the vast array of technologies used by web hosting providers to give you better performance and stability (as well as a brief review of other criteria every shared hosting customer should know about). Attendees will leave with a more nuanced understanding of hosting technologies and better able to make decisions. The discussion will be geared towards users of shared/reseller hosting, though much of it is also applicable to building your own VPS/dedicated solution. We will cover: A quick glance at the data that shows, yes, speed is of paramount importance Benchmarks for the world’s top WordPress hosts Hardware SSDs (What are they good for? When will they help?) Cloud/cluster setup SAN Resources Disk space (How much do you need?) CPU/RAM (When listed) What does unlimited mean? (Nothing.) Software Control panels (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, proprietary panels) CloudLinux (and similar setups) Web Servers: Apache vs. LiteSpeed vs. NGINX Page caching (Varnish, NGINX, SuperCacher) Backups (R1Soft, Bacula, Acronis) One-click installers (Fantastico, Softaculous) Services CDNs Anti-spam (Spam Experts, Postini) Anti-malware (StopTheHacker, SiteLock) Website builders Support Where to look for hosting deals