Rocket.net – Fiercely Independent & Fiercely Yours
- •
- 4 min read
Ben Gabler is the CEO and Founder of Rocket.net. After spending 18 years in the hosting industry, working for some of the top brands in the space, here’s how Ben’s obsession with website speed led to the launch of Rocket.net, the world’s fastest WordPress hosting on the market.
WordPress hosting companies love to throw around the word “fastest.” But, just how many of those companies can prove it? For most, it’s just an empty promise. For Rocket.net, on the other hand, we live and breathe website speed.
Speed has been a core principle of our business model since our launch. We set out on a journey to bring the fastest WordPress hosting to the market to help companies and creators of all sizes and shapes host websites that perform, resulting in significant business growth.
When we were in the planning stages of launching Rocket.net, I was amazed to see the same thing on virtually every hosting provider’s website. Something like “We’re 200-300 times faster” or “Google Cloud makes us the fastest.”
The problem was (and still is) those claims just aren’t valid. Before launching Rocket.net, I ran a Global CDN (15Tb/s+) where I encountered frustrated WordPress users all the time who weren’t getting the speed they wanted. The main reason was their hosting provider told them to use the CDN the wrong way (static assets only) and they were scaling PHP instead of their content.
To be fair, configuring and leveraging a CDN is very complex, but focusing on PHP performance in a single location is also ancient thinking. So, rather than just copying the rest and offering our spin on Google Cloud, I decided to create the world’s fastest and most secure managed WordPress Hosting platform at the edge of the cloud, all with no configuration required.
Today, the speed of your WordPress website plays a significant role in the success of your business. Our team is composed of WordPress Developers and hosting industry veterans, with nearly 20 years of first-hand experience in the hosting industry.
We’ve seen everything right about WordPress hosting, and we’ve seen everything that’s wrong.
Before Rocket.net, I spent a combined 18 years in the hosting industry, helping some of the biggest names in the business launch and grow. I helped relaunch the entire hosting product line at GoDaddy in 2013, in my opinion making GoDaddy a genuine hosting company for the first time in its history. With our average daily sign-ups at 2600, I saw hosting at scale like never before.
But, there was always something nagging at me. None of the major players had it right. Customers were underserved, and websites weren’t performing where they needed to be.
We launched Rocket.net to fix the issues at hand and set the standard for the hosting industry. We’ve set out to create the world’s fastest WordPress hosting because we understand the impact speed has on your website’s performance and the success of your business.
We built the world’s fastest and most secure managed WordPress hosting at the edge of the cloud. We’ve seen firsthand the problems with the products offered by other hosting companies in the market and the impact a truly fast WordPress hosting partner can have on your business.
As a society, we’ve lost the ability to wait patiently. Even a 1-second delay can create a negative experience for your site visitors. When this happens, you’ll see negative stats like an increase in bounce rate appearing in your analytics.
Consider this. You’re kicked back on the sofa, Roku remote in hand, ready to stream your favorite Netflix series. You open the app, but instead of clicking through and powering up the latest episode of Cobra Kai, Netflix stops loading at 25%. It seems like it will never pop up, and you begin to wonder if the service is broken.
The same goes for your website. When someone visits your site and encounters a delay, the likelihood the visitor will bounce and go elsewhere to find what they need increases significantly. Google notes that the probability of bounce rate increases by around 32% for each additional second it takes for your site to load. When visitors bounce from your site, they’re unlikely to return, especially if they find what they’re looking for on another, much faster website.
Things become tricky for site owners. It’s challenging to find the sweet spot between keeping the search engines happy while providing your visitors with an optimal experience. It’s the delicate balance between optimizing for a bot and a human. With Rocket.net, our 70ms Global TTFB helps remove the network latency, allowing more flexibility in your content rendering by shaving 800ms-8s off your FCP.
It’s not uncommon to see tools out there aiming for the perfect pagespeed score that makes a website look broken for a split second. The problem occurs when CSS is side-loaded into the website vs. having critical CSS generated and already in the document.
As a Google bot, this may appease me because of Core Web Vital scores, but as an actual human, this makes me believe the site is broken and maybe even hacked/not to be trusted.
At Rocket.net, we help customers take advantage of things like critical CSS generation and delivery on an industry-leading 70ms TTFB around the world to reduce the initial load time of your site, allowing you to optimize for both humans and machines properly.
To avoid any negative impact on your business, be sure to get set up with the fastest WordPress hosting available.
Multiple studies have proven that the fastest websites see conversion rates much higher than their slower counterparts. As you can see in this chart from Cloudflare, sites with a load time of 2.4 seconds had a 1.9% conversion rate. On the opposite end of the spectrum, sites with a load time of > 5.7 seconds saw their average conversion rate drop to < 0.6%.
Think about the volume of your sales. If you missed out on 1.3% of those sales, how much money would your business leave on the table? That’s why speed has always been a top priority for us in providing our customers with the best WordPress hosting experience and website performance.
Google made a definitive statement that page speed is a direct ranking factor. If you’ve read even one article on SEO, you likely know it’s a severe SEO mistake to ignore the almighty Google. So, take heed.
Page speed is a significant factor in Google’s Core Web Vitals. As Google fine-tunes its focus on user experience, taking action to improve your website’s speed is critical. Be sure your site is hosting on the fastest WordPress hosting, and take all necessary steps to optimize other elements of your site to boost the performance.
At Rocket.net, we regularly run tests to ensure you’re receiving the fastest WordPress hosting in the world. Just how fast is Rocket.net’s WordPress hosting? Pretty darn fast!
As you can see, we beat the competition by a long shot. We’re dedicated to maintaining our position as the fastest WordPress hosting provider. So, our team of experts is continually testing and making improvements to ensure we stay on top and your website thrives as a result.
We believe in the power of transparency. Many companies claim to have the fastest WordPress Hosting, but we set out to continuously prove it. We display real-time speed performance metrics on our site at all times. Nothing to hide here! See below for the proof.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of proxy servers and data centers distributed worldwide. As content is delivered through a particular server, that content is cached, allowing it to be delivered more quickly, no matter where your website is accessed in the world.
Rocket.net is powered by Cloudflare Enterprise CDN. As a Rocket.net customer, you enjoy Cloudflare as a standard part of your hosting with no additional costs to you (a $6,000 per month value with no hidden fees). The result – response times 2-3x faster than Google Cloud, Amazon, and Azure.
With Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, you eliminate the need for unwieldy and sometimes costly plugins. Instant speed optimization via off-server optimizations compress, load, and perform image resizing that boosts performance without any additional expense.
Rocket.net’s WordPress servers are strategically placed in various locations worldwide through our partnership with Cloudflare. Our network is greater than 250 edge locations strong, giving your site faster speed and enhanced security.
Are you sold on the value of Cloudflare Enterprise? It’s a no-brainer. At no cost to you as a Rocket.net client, it’s a massive win for your website.
Getting set up with the fastest WordPress hosting is step one. But, there are other important things your hosting provider of choice should offer as standard. Beyond website speed, be sure the WordPress hosting provider you choose offers the following as standard features of your engagement.
Our team of experts is always on. We strongly focus on providing the best customer support in the WordPress hosting space 24/7. We’re constantly monitoring performance to ensure your website stays up and running and operating at top levels.
Do a little digging into the availability of your hosting partner’s customer service experts. You should have access to them via phone, email, live chat, a client service area, social media, and other communication channels.
Response time should be measured in seconds, not in days. The last thing you need is for your site to experience an issue, and you end up spending hours trying to track down someone to help you.
When you switch WordPress hosting providers, you shouldn’t have to pay to migrate your site to the new hosting. Whether you have 1 or 1000 websites to migrate, you shouldn’t have to pay a penny for the migration.
You’ve got too much going on trying to maintain and grow your business. The last thing you need to worry about is a complicated website migration.
Navigating your control panel shouldn’t be rocket science (pun intended). You should have simple access to powerful reporting, add team members, launch a staging site, pay your bills, manage your database, and so much more. The best WordPress hosting providers offer a clean, smooth user experience within the control panel.
Unhappy with the speed of your WordPress website? Let’s talk about how we can migrate your site to Rocket.net, the fastest WordPress hosting available anywhere.
Our team of experts is standing by. Most website owners have switched hosting providers multiple times over the history of their site. We’re confident that you won’t look back once you make the switch to Rocket.net.
The best customer support 24/7, super fast speed, ease-of-use, and access to top tools and industry-leading resources should always come standard. We’re revolutionizing the way your WordPress site gets served up to the world, and we look forward to partnering with you in growing your business.