Maximise your startup's chances of success: begin with your web hosting
Written by David Kramaley
Being a startup founder can be tough. Prominent serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, has compared starting a company to eating glass. There are financial struggles, unpaid time, website downtime, taxes, accounting, and many other challenges (GDPR anyone?). It soon becomes obvious what Elon meant.

So, how can founders go from such adverse circumstances to prosperity and success? We recently raised £100,000 from investors and eventually closed on even more. To achieve that, we have needed every little advantage we could get. Regardless of how small, these advantages add up. In this post, I will share what I consider one of the important things we did right on our path to growth and success.

When your business depends on your web site, choosing fast and reliable web hosting is a must. These are seemingly simple things that if you get wrong, can come back to haunt you. Regardless of which web host you choose, you should look for the following things:

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Insanely Fast Craft CMS Shared Hosting
Written by Jo Stonehouse
At Kualo, we're big fans of Craft CMS.

We first became aware of Craft a few years ago, but more recently we've seen an notable increase in the number of sites that are using it on our hosting platform.

Compared to other content management systems, Craft remains relatively unknown - but those who discover it quickly fall in love.

It's easy to see why, too.

Craft has many advantages over the "big gun" content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla - both for content creators and developers alike. Craft is simple, intuitive, elegant and lightweight, yet at the same time, extremely powerful and extensible. But let's get one thing clear - Craft is not for bang-it-out template sites, nor DIY website enthusiasts. No, Craft is for designers and developers who want total creative freedom and flexibility, with the need to work within the constraints and bloat of a CMS with countless plugins, template limitations and security woes. Craft is aimed at people who see web development as a true craft.

So, this brings me to the purpose of this post - Craft CMS hosting.

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Accelerating WordPress sites with Redis, LiteSpeed Cache & CloudFlare Railgun
Written by Jo Stonehouse
WordPress is the most popular content management systems on the internet today, powering some 25% of all websites. From a personal blogging site to a full WooCommerce powered shop, WordPress is a smart choice due to its extensive choice of themes, ease of use and powerful features available thanks to the thousands of plugins that have been written for it.

Over 70% of the sites that we host which use a CMS, are powered by WordPress. It's popularity is staggering, and as such every day we handle a wide number of queries relating to WordPress, from basic how to's, through to more advanced debugging.

One issue that comes up from time to time is speed.

We've invested heavily in developing a WordPress hosting infrastructure that's as fast as can be - with PHP7, OpCode Caching, HTTP/2, super-fast SSD based disks and more. Compared to most hosts, our platform for WordPress already is super-fast. But nonetheless, there were still cases where some of our customers ran into speed issues, usually the result of there being too many plugins, poorly written plugins, or unoptimised themes.

Historically, to get faster speeds out of these sites might have involved an upgrade to a virtual or dedicated server, where we can use specialist caching solutions and also leverage more server power. However, thanks to the introduction of server side page caching and backend database caching on our business hosting plans, these technologies are now also available without going to the expense of running your own server!

If WordPress was fast before, these technologies turbo charge it.

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Websites, at LiteSpeed.
Written by Jo Stonehouse
We recently announced the addition of Redis and Memcached to our Business Hosting Plans, two of the most widely used solutions to accelerate database queries through caching.

Today, we're introducing another speed enhancing tool - LiteSpeed Cache.

LiteSpeed Cache can dramatically increase the speed of your website. This can have significant impact on your search engine ranking and also improve your user experience and the number of prospective customers your business converts.

Once implemented, your site will operate, quite literally, at light speed.

The performance is simply breathtaking.

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Want more speed? You got it. Redis & Memcached are now available!
Written by Jo Stonehouse
Get ready to enhance the performance of your database driven applications - Redis & Memcached have now arrived at Kualo!

The developers among you who have heard about these technologies will no doubt be incredibly excited to hear this.

But don't be despondent if you haven't the first idea what Redis or Memcached are - we'll explain everything to you in this post, and let you know how you can implement them.

And best of all, we're able to make Redis and Memcached available on shared hosting - both now included as standard with our Business Hosting plans.

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