Deep Dive - What is Speed Boost?

30 Sep 2021, by Slade Baylis

In the 1970s a term called “Moore's Law” was coined which stated that overall processing power for computers will double every two years. Though it specifically talked about the number of transistors within computer CPUs, it still holds true today that things in the IT space will often move very quickly. The shift of more and more business systems continuously moving to cloud-based solutions is emblematic of this. So too is how quickly we see hardware being replaced - as newer and faster versions are designed, developed and released to market. 

With these developments, it can be hard for business owners to know what is available out there and how to best leverage it. As we are constantly researching what new technology is available and adapting our offerings to match, we thought it would be a good idea to share our findings. To do that we’re starting a new series on our blog called “Deep Dive”. Our goal with these articles is simply to help our customers understand what technology is available and how best to use it to empower their own businesses. 

For this first article of this “Deep Dive” series, we’ll be covering our “Speed Boost” offerings both for our regular Shared Web Hosting plans and our Virtual Private Server services. 

What is Speed Boost?

First, a quick introduction into Shared Web Hosting (SWH). As the name implies, a shared web hosting service is one where the server itself isn’t just hosting a single website, but multiple websites. Usually these are websites that are owned by different businesses, all utilising the same underlying server. The benefits of this are that no single business needs to cover the costs of running and maintaining an entire server themselves, making it much more economical. 

We offer SWH services and to make them better than other providers, we decided to make them a “high-availability” service. What this means is that they are protected against downtime by having all data duplicated between multiple physical servers. This makes our SWH platform one of the most reliable in the industry. However, we didn’t just stop there, we also wanted customers to be able to get access to extra performance if their specific applications or websites needed it. To do that we launched a separate optional addon to our SWH plans called “Speed Boost”.

With this Speed Boost addon, customers upgrade by having their hosting plans moved to a separate cluster of servers with higher tier hardware. The hardware used with our regular servers was already enterprise level Dell equipment, so with these new servers, we wanted to go beyond that and offer an even higher tier of CPU architecture that comes with premium NVMe SSDs. These upgrades help improve the speed of hosting accounts for our clients, giving them an edge when trying to get their websites and applications to be as fast as possible.

We also saw the opportunity to do the same for our Virtual Private Server (VPS) services as well. Our VPS services are aimed to fill the gap between our SWH and higher VMware offerings, for customers who have grown to need their own server, but don’t need the high-end and high-availability offerings of our VMware platform. Even with it being the more economical option, we still wanted to have an upgrade option for those who wanted more performance. So to that we launched a Speed Boost VPS platform that also offered premium CPU architecture and that same high-performance NVMe SSD technology.

CPU Architecture – The difference processing power can make

Both of these new Speed Boost platforms offer newer CPU architecture. To understand what that means, we first need to explain what a CPU is and what it does. The term CPU stands for “Central Processing Unit”. It is responsible for carrying out the tasks of a computer and is commonly referred to as the ‘brain’ of the computer. It controls all the other components within the computer and tells them what to do based on various instructions it receives from software on the computer. 

For websites specifically, the speed of the CPU can directly affect how quickly your website appears when someone tries to visit it. This is why it’s important to consider both the make and model of CPU that’s being used with the physical servers hosting your SWH or VPS services. Choosing a provider that uses enterprise grade CPU architecture can literally speed up your websites by seconds!

Whilst there are a lot of different ways that CPU performance can be measured, as a general rule, it’s true that newer versions are usually faster than older ones. This is because manufacturers work to optimise and improve the underlying technology year after year to get them to be faster than the previous versions. With our Speed Boost platforms, we utilise newer and faster CPU architecture to increase the processing power available to our clients. This allows their websites to handle more incoming requests, process information faster, as well as making them load much faster overall.

NVMe SSDs – Faster access to stored information

Another area to keep in mind when looking at server hardware is the speed of the storage that your website or server is hosted on. Whilst it’s become more common for providers to offer SSD storage with their platforms, we thought we would go a step above and provide the best SSDs available for our platforms. 

Our Speed Boost platforms utilise NVMe SSDs for their storage. NVMe stands for “Non-Volatile Memory Express”, but it’s how it works that is the interesting part. With regular SSD drives, a cable is used to connect the drives to the motherboard, and by extension, the computer’s CPU. These cables work well, however, in recent years they have become a bottleneck for hard-drive speeds. Thus a solution was thought of which was to utilise the high-bandwidth connection that graphics cards use to send data to the CPU. NVMe SSDs utilise that same high bandwidth connectively to offer “read” and “write” speeds up to 15 times faster than regular SSD drives!

The question remains though: how can faster SSDs help with a website’s load time? Well, they help by speeding up any retrieval of information from that storage, and also by allowing things to be saved faster. Each of these are referred to as “read” and “write” respectively when measuring hard-drive performance. These much higher read speeds mean that if your website needs to fetch a large amount of information from a database, it can do that much quicker than on slower drives. On the other side, the higher write speeds allow for large amounts of data to be saved much quicker. This not only helps speed up the website for visitors, but can also speed up any back-end administrator areas on your website, making maintenance much less painful for your web developers!

Cost vs Performance – Small difference in price, big difference in performance

With any business decision, it normally comes down to cost-benefit analyses. Whilst it’s true that in most cases the more money you invest the more performance you can get, the question is whether or not it makes sense from a business standpoint. We’ve taken this into consideration when designing the services and have aimed to make adding Speed Boost as affordable as possible.

When it comes to website performance though, the cost to get an increase in speed could even end up paying for itself. As mentioned in a previous article about network latency, half of respondents in a study from FastHosts said that a slow website was the main reason for abandoning an online purchase. Worse yet, around the same number of people said that they would never go back to that website afterwards. Due to this, investing slightly more in your infrastructure now could end up increasing the conversion rate on your website.

In order to see how our VPS services compare, we recommend going to our Build Your Own page available here. Using that Build Your Own tool, you can build your own VPS to see the pricing differences between our regular VPS and our Speed Boost platform. The difference in price is miniscule compared to added performance! For our SWH plans, the upgrade to the Speed Boost platform starts at as little as $13.20 per month, which, for better technology and up to double the CPU and RAM resources, is a no-brainer.

The only accurate way to measure performance

There are many different ways to try and calculate the hypothetical difference that different hardware configurations can make. However, the only way to know for sure is to trial the changes and then observe your website to see if it is noticeably faster. Using this “where the rubber meets the road” method allows you to see the actual effect that each small change has when measured cumulatively. There is little risk in this approach because if the changes don’t improve speeds as expected, they can easily be rolled back.

With these points in mind, we recommend our Speed Boost platforms to anyone who is looking to get some extra performance out of their website. By increasing the power of the hardware used by your website and performing website optimisation steps (as we’ve detailed in our Seven ways to get more performance from your website article earlier), you can really make you website fly.

Interesting in our speed boosted hosting or virtual private servers?

If you are interested in our Speed Boost platforms or have any questions about them or this article, you can contact us via email at sales@micron21.com or give us a call on 1300 769 972 (Option #1). 

Each and every business has different needs and we’ll be able to tailor a solution that works best for you.