Everyone who knows about technical SEO or is a web developer is running after the site speed. Google has made it official that speed affects your search engine rankings directly by launching core web vitals. Google did not stop here, they introduced it in the search console as well.
Now that we talk about WordPress, Hosting a WordPress site is such a crucial thing that defines its success on the search engines. Choosing a bad hosting company will make you lose a big amount on the table. On the other hand, the right hosting company will turn the tables for you and make your website a success. Last month, I found one such hosting company. Its rocket.net
Rocket hosts your website on the fastest cloud platform and skyrockets its loading speed.
Rocket Pricing
Comparing to any other managed WordPress hosting pricing, you get enough value for your money when you host your website with Rocket.
The pricing plans are pretty much affordable not only for a small-scale business website but also for a huge enterprise. The agency plan covers the maximum of it.
The pricing feels more comfortable when you host more than 1 website.
The List of Features
While you see all the major features of the platform right on the Rocket website, there are many you would only be able to see when you actually test the platform out.
- One staging environment with every site you deploy with rocket
- When you get the starter plan, you get 2 WordPress sites. 1 would be your live site and another is your staging environment where you can test plugins, get your site redesign, and lot more.
- You can push the staging site to the live environment with a single click
- Login to your WordPress site dashboard with a single click
- Configure WordPress Multisite or WooCommerce with a single click
- You can choose the PHP version for your site in the advanced settings
- It is possible to set auto-update option for the themes installed on your WordPress site
You can test the 166$ plan for the first month for only $1. Go ahead and check it out.
How to Set Up a Website with Rocket
Let’s go ahead and create a website.
Open rocket.net and select your plan. If you’re not sure about the plan you want to start with, just click on “Get started”.
As you can see that I have selected the Agency plan that costs 200$ per month. However, with the limited time promotion, I got it for just 1$ for the first month which is a good enough price to test things out.
Once you complete the signup process and log in to your account, you see a dashboard like this.
Click on the “Create site” button in the middle of your screen.
The onboarding process is so easy. You only need to type in the name of the website and choose the region where you want to host your website.
In the next step, you will be asked to provide more information to set up your WordPress administrator account.
As you can see that you have the option to install a multisite network or an eCommerce store with woocommerce instead.
Choose an administrator username and set a password. Type in your Email address and click on the “Continue” button to proceed with the wizard.
Once you click Continue, it will take a while to set up a fresh WordPress installation for your website.
At this stage, you have created a website on Rocket hosting. However, it is not your domain.
But you need not worry about that and you should now go ahead, log in to your WordPress site, and start designing your dream website. Once you’re ready with the launch, you can set the domain for it.
This will keep you safe from the wrong indexing on Google.
Configuring your domain with Rocket hosting
Once you’re ready to go live and have a fully qualified domain name ready for your website, Click on “Get Started” button on your site’s dashboard.
Now is the time when you type your domain name and configure the DNS records.
When you click the continue button, the screen will appear instructing you to set TXT records for your domain. This setting is important to configure and install an SSL certificate for your domain.
Follow the instructions and click on the “I’ve added TXT records, Continue” button after a few minutes.
The next step is where you add the CNAME record of your domain to the rocket site subdomain.
Once you add the CNAME records, your site will be live and your Rocket dashboard will show your domain on the site.
Creating a Staging Site
When you host a business website, you may not want to test a few plugins on a live website. Neither you would want anyone to change any piece of content before proper testing and approvals.
The staging site helps you do all the testing on an environment where you won’t harm the live site. This is helpful when you’re redesigning your site or testing some new features using a plugin.
You can create 1 staging environment with each number of sites you host on rocket platform with just a single click.
Once your staging environment is deployed, you get the option to switch between them right from your dashboard.
Speed Test
As a usual process of testing the website speed, let’s do a test on time to the first byte for this website which has SSL enabled already.
The server sent the first byte within 20ms which is amazingly fast enough. This was after a long time after I saw a website scoring Green 5 stars in this TTFB checking tool.
Furthermore, let’s check the performance score and loading time in GTmetrix for the domain I just hosted on rocket. Before I check speed, I imported a demo website using starter site plugin.
Below is the test screenshot without any optimization plugin installed.
I believe that the first page view will build the page caches. Once I click retest, I would be able to see the real speed of my website.
Just to confirm that this speed will not fluctuate much, I retested it couple of times.
And wow, I got even faster pages.
So, to conclude this, you get to host a website with speed like a rocket when you deploy with Rocket.
Dynamic content delivery and its smart server level caching makes it seamless for you. You may never need to install any optimization plugin.
Taking a manual backup, Never been this easy
When you host your website with a managed wordpress hosting provider, you worry less about the backups. When you host with Rocket, you get free manual and automatic backups.
This means that you can create a snapshot of your whole website using the manual backups option. The feature proves to be helpful when you need to keep a snapshot of your production website at a specific stage on your local machine.
To do this, simple go to Backups, Click on Create backup.
The popup will open asking you to choose the components that you want to include in the snapshot. Choose everything and click “Create”.
You should see a manual backup entry on your dashboard in a while.
Now you can download this to your local machine or restore this to the production side in the future.
Advanced options
When you build and develop your website on WordPress, there are certain situations where you require a specific version of php to support various plugins. Luckily, you have the option to configure this in the Advanced tab in your dashboard.
The advanced section contains more than just the php version. You can enable or disable auto updates for WordPress core, themes or plugins.
If you want to monitor your website further and see what all crons are running on your site, you can see a list of them in the advanced settings only. Additionally, to automate more tasks, you have the option of creating a custom new cronjob from your rocket dashboard.
Conclusion
Hosting a website on the cloud manually may get your hands dirty with the console and the commands. However, a managed hosting platform gives you the peace of mind to solely focus on website development, content management, and the monetization part. Ultimately, you don’t have to worry about any server-side fault when you host your website on Rocket.
Get ready and start a trial of Rocket.com hosting with confidence.
The never before experience is waiting for you.
