We at Zoner have been in business since 2005 and are one of the most well-known Finnish hosting companies. We develop and maintain the various website hosting services out of which our latest addition to our product portfolio is WP-Cloud. It’s our Managed WordPress Service built on top of UpCloud’s infrastructure, which we launched at the end of 2018. Out of all the sites we host, more than half are WordPress sites varying from small blogs to enterprise level online stores.

Previous challenges
As a hosting provider, we previously managed a server infrastructure of our own. However, we recognize that our key focus should be in helping our customers and developing the actual service we provide instead of maintaining the hardware. While looking for a suitable service provider, we had certain demands. Two key aspects and reasons why customers choose Zoner in the first place are fast servers and fast customer service. These, of course, needed to be matched by the new provider.

Partnering up with UpCloud has allowed us to focus on what matters. Our goal was to achieve the greatest performance and reliability for our customer’s WordPress sites, and UpCloud has exceeded our expectations with their outstanding performance and uptime. In addition, we hold our partners to the same high standards as ourselves, and UpCloud has been able to meet our expectations. We also love that there are several server locations for us and for our clients to choose from. Since most of our current clients reside in Finland, it was crucial for us to have at least one server location in Helsinki.

Hosting on UpCloud
Unlike our competitors, our WordPress optimized service includes a private VPS for each of our customers. This enables us to use many features to scale resources when and where needed. Our customers are even able to scale their website performance themselves, both horizontally and vertically. Every customer’s server is running performance-tuned webserver combination with access to our highly available database cluster through the internal private network.

The UpCloud API has been a very important part of automating the whole process. Being able to fully control the environment from our own systems is vital in our business. Furthermore, our own development environment is also deployed on UpCloud.

Improvements
Using UpCloud infrastructure has helped us to shift from being just a technical service provider to being an expert WordPress service provider. By reducing the amount of time spent on hardware, we have been able to focus more on our customers and develop services that ease their life. The performance of each WordPress installation has improved dramatically when compared to our competitor’s services. On average, WordPress sites that are transferred to our service, have reduced site load time in half and being able to handle multiple times more visitors than before.

We have a good connection and communication to the UpCloud crew and feel that our feedback and wishes are truly heard. In general, we have also been satisfied with the uptime and performance of the servers. We understand that there are always some glitches and downtime here and there but are fully satisfied by how UpCloud handles and refunds possible problems.

Future plans
We have recently launched our Managed WordPress services in each datacenter UpCloud offers in order to serve our international customers better globally. In the future, it would be nice to see UpCloud offering load-balancing features and freely scalable servers without downtime due to slow reboots.