This is the second of a series of articles dedicated to building a successful online presence. The following article is dedicated to site loading speeds. Check out the first article on website security, in case you have missed it.

If content is king, then website loading speed is the ‘scepter’ of the king, which allows him to reach his citizens in the fastest possible way.

Just as the content needs to be of decent quality to capture the reader’s eye, the website loading speed needs to be as fast as possible so that the quality content in question can be delivered on time before the reader loses interest.

As we know, the attention span of site visitors has dropped significantly over the last years, so the faster a site loads, the less bounce rates it will score. Not to mention the fact that site loading speed is one of the major factors in the Google ranking algorithm.

There are many hardware/software quality factors that influence the loading speed rates, most of them being in the very hands of the web hosting providers.

Here is how we, at ResellersPanel, face these factors to make sure that you and your customers enjoy blazing-fast loading speeds that ‘rule’.

SSD Storage – we use SSD drives instead of regular HDDs, since they offer an innovative technology for data storage, which uses electronic interfaces. Also, they are more compact in size and have no moving parts and rotating disks. This makes data reading more straightforward (allowing for a file access time of 0.1 millisecond) and site loading – noticeably faster. Tests have shown that a site hosted on an SSD performs significantly faster than a site hosted on an HDD. You can make a simple test – compare the performances of SSD- and HDD-equipped PCs and see for yourself.

Data Compression – thanks to the ZFS LZ4 compression that we use to store your customers’ content, data reading and writing on our hosting platform is a lot faster. This means that your customers’ sites will be delivered faster to the public in comparison with sites stored on an EXT4-based cPanel hosting platform.

A Well-Balanced Platform – we have built a custom cloud hosting platform where the server workload is being distributed between a few machines instead of just one. The even distribution of core service tasks allows for server requests to be carried out faster. This way, your customers’ mails will go through faster; their web applications will perform faster and their sites will load faster.

Data Caching – we use special methods to cache your frequently accessed site content in the server RAM, so that future requests for that data can be served faster. We deploy servers with large amounts of RAM to make sure that larger site contents are cached efficiently as well.

PHP Opcode Caching – we use the APC (Alternative PHP Caching) framework to avoid the overhead of parsing and compiling source code on each request and to ensure that dynamic web pages are served faster. This tool works perfectly well with applications with a large source-code base such as Drupal, leading to a 3x increase in the page generation speed. You can enable APC caching for your PHP resources from the Advanced section of the Control Panel.

Website Accelerators – in the web hosting Control Panel, your customers will find various tools that will help them speed up their sites and applications as an extra measure. Memcached will help users reduce the number of times a database or API is read by caching data and objects in RAM. It is perfect for traffic-heavy, database-driven websites like large e-stores, busy blogs, news portals, etc. Varnish, in turn, is an HTTP accelerator that caches not-so-often updated pages of content-heavy websites to make them load faster to the visitor. Node.js is perfect for speeding up data-intensive, real-time applications.

A Custom-Built Network for Faster Access – our administrators have built a custom, load-balanced internal network in the data center, so as to boost the communication between the different servers in our load-balanced platform (as mentioned above). Also, we have selected data centers that use various major ISPs and that have access to several main Internet backbones to ensure a lightning-fast connection between your customers’ sites and the rest of the world.

A Choice of Data Centers – since the location of a site is tightly connected with how fast it will resolve to its visitors, we offer your customers a choice of data center locations across the world. Thus, they can choose to host their sites as close to their audiences as possible and achieve the fastest possible site loading speed. We have a data center in the USA for North and South America-based websites, a UK data center for websites based in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and a facility in Australia aimed at serving websites in Australia, Oceania and Asia.