Update: We no longer host websites internally, and have retired our Stratos & Turbo servers. Read: The rabbit hole that is WordPress Web Hosting
We’re not a full-fledged web hosting company but we do host some of our clients’ websites in our server, for client convenience and also to make it easier for us to diagnose any problems that may crop up. One of the problems we commonly deal with are slow website load times, and low memory issues, which are directly related to the strength of the server.
One downside about building websites on WordPress is the platform uses a lot of resources on the server, especially CPU and RAM (memory). There are many ways to optimise WordPress so that it uses less server resources, but ultimately you need a strong server to handle the load of your website, especially if you plan to grow your website traffic.
With that in mind, we acquired a new high-CPU and high-memory VPS server to better serve you, our dear clients. Please refer to the Hosting page for latest pricing & server specs, as it may change from time to time, but at this time of writing, the new server has 4x E5-Xeon CPU cores, 16GB of RAM, running on a RAID10 HDD configuration (close to SSD performance). By comparison, our previous Shared Hosting plan has an allocation of 0.5 CPU and 1GB RAM on SSD.
This may seem overkill for some clients who just want “a website that works” – yes, but if you think about it, a website is supposed to work for you 24/7/365, so in our opinion, paying $20/mo for decent web hosting is worth it.
We will contact you individually to offer a promotional price to upgrade to this new server based on your current hosting cycle.
However we do understand if you’d prefer to host your site elsewhere. Here are some alternatives we can recommend:
(Non-affiliate links, click with confidence. Prices in USD)
- Serverfreak (from $24/yr)
- Best for Malaysians
- Shared hosting, very limited CPU & RAM resources
- Cheap, no frills, good service
- Great if you just want lots of space & unlimited email accounts
- SiteGround (from $144/yr ($48/1st year))
- A good step-up from shared hosting
- First year is really cheap
- Suitable for low-traffic sites
- Cloudways (from $120/yr)
- Good value, well tuned server
- For very web-savvy customers only
- Kinsta (from $360/yr)
- For high-traffic sites that need fast response
- Managed hosting
- Digital Ocean (from $60/yr)
- Great value for web developers
- Extremely steep learning curve
- Amazon AWS / Alibaba Hosting / Google Hosting
- Best value if you just want to pay for hardware
- High-level support only, no handholding
- Recommended for dev-ops or web engineers and above only
Based on our experience, we DO NOT RECOMMEND:
- Exabytes
- Bluehost
- GoDaddy
- Yahoo
- Any server that runs on Windows (WordPress is best run on Linux)
One thing to note is that, most shared hosting providers will sell you on their high storage allocations, free domain, free SSL, unlimited bandwidth, and more. However, you’ll find that it is very difficult to obtain information about their CPU and RAM allocations, because it is the most expensive component of the server. Please take this into consideration when choosing a web host (this was the exact reason why we acquired our own server with extremely high CPU and RAM specs). If you’ve changed your mind and would like to host with us, please view our latest hosting plan here.
In closing, if you host with us, we can be your single point of contact for your website. Should you prefer to host your site elsewhere, you’ll have to work with another team for your hosting-related matters, and you may have some trouble with more technical conversations.
We leave it to you to make the best decision for your company. Regardless of which hosting provider you choose to go with, just know that we at Pixl will do our best to support you where we can.
Cheers from Kuala Lumpur.
Michael Kwan
Founder
