In this article, we’re going to review our experience with Pressidium WordPress Hosting. This hosting company serves enterprise level customers. It's not created for your standard mom-and-pop shop that only gets a couple thousand views per month. Instead it's created for businesses, nonprofits, and other websites that have was demanding needs for hosting. For example, many of the worlds largest WordPress websites are hosted by this company, including Cornell University, Unicef, Backlinko, and others.

After having launched several major WordPress websites hosted by Pressidium, we feel qualified to write a review of their service. In this article, we’ll cover the performance, backend user interface, Pressidium support service, and all other aspects of this hosting company. We hope it will help you make an informed decision on what the best WordPress host is for your needs. We’ve also used several other companies that occupy a similar sector in the hosting industry, so will do our best to compare and contrast between them, which should hopefully give you more data to work with when making your decision.

Our experience with the company

To date, we have used this hosting service in three major projects, all covering different areas of the website spectrum:

• A large nonprofit website with high monthly traffic, but a stable load.
• An e-commerce website doing several million in sales per year. Incredibly erratic traffic, as they have viral success and marketing.
• A standard corporate website for a company with international presence.

As you can see, all of these companies require enterprise level hosting, but have different requirements for their websites. One has high monthly traffic, one has erratic spikes in traffic, and the other has international visitors. Each website is mission critical to the success of their company, so they need to be up 100% of the time and can never crash.

We've only recently been working with clients who have hosting requirements that make using this service possible, but in the future, we will definitely be recommending this to many of our larger, or higher traffic setups. This article seeks to show you why.

Pressidium’s Positioning In a Crowded Hosting Market

Pressidium markets itself as a WordPress host, but differentiates in the fact that it is really only targeting larger websites and digital assets. It's nowhere near shared hosting, or even a VPS. This is a top-of-the line, premium offering.

Pressidium’s enterprise level hardware

The main selling point of this service is the enterprise architecture created by IT professionals with many years of experience. Pressidium’s offer is a unique approach to hosting; Instead of putting your website on a single standalone server and calling it a day, each website hosted on their service is present on a multi know that server cluster. That means insane redundancy, scalability, and load handling.

First, here’s a summary if you’re not familiar with hosting architecture terminology:

Pressidium is incredibly transparent with how the enterprise level infrastructure is created and set up. The defining standard that they follow is uptime. The platform has no single point of failure and is created so the website is always up and running. This is important if you have a larger mission critical website that is either generating revenue or credibility for your company.

Instead of running your WordPress website on a single server, they have clusters of servers. This is known as load balanced fall tolerant Hi availability architecture. If you were to set this up yourself, it would be incredibly costly and complex to manage.

If one server goes down, the next will replace it, ensuring that your website will always be available to the end-user.

Each of these servers within the cluster are a complete duplicate of each other, boasting some of the best hardware in the industry, which you can learn more about below.

If your website experiences any major spikes in traffic, you're hosting infrastructure it will scale horizontally and vertically without disruption for your site due to the fact that it is present on multiple server installations. If demand outpaces the physical hardware, new server clusters are deployed to the cloud and then associated with your website for the time being. What this means is that no matter what traffic you're getting, your website should be delivered quickly to any and all visitors and never go down due to an overload.

All of this infrastructure is managed by a world-class team, meaning you never need to worry about the Hosting set up... only your business that resides on it.

Skip to the next section, which discusses the backend design and usability of the hosting platform, of you’re happy with this explanation of how Pressidium does things. Click here to skip.

The infrastructure scales on demand with a load balancing layer. Each request to the website is dispatched to the least busy server in the node that your website runs on. If the traffic on the website peaks, it is then distributed evenly across all server farms eliminating slashdot (This is caused by the links from a much larger and higher traffic website points to a very small website overloading it or causing it to crash... also know as the Reddit Effect) effects and enhancing security.

And that’s just a load balancing for when traffic scales rapidly. For the actual performance, there’s a ton of caching as well as incredibly solid hardware to back it up.

The company uses Varnish caching as the “building block” of this stack. On top of that, there’s a web-cache, which has dedicated servers offering two layers of caching. Layer 1 Stores frequently accessed content in dedicated Random Access Memory, whereas Layer 2 uses solid-state drive disc arrays for less frequently accessed content.

The company created an Adaptive Caching Engine which takes a look at the traffic to your specific website and then enforces the most efficient Caching rules for it.

The WordPress stack is located on each individual server of the cluster that your website is installed on. This includes PHP 7 and the latest WordPress version. On each of these installations there is a PHP object cache as well as an opcode cache (stored in RAM).

In keeping with the “cluster ideology”, Pressidium also groups databases in clusters of three, based on the Percona XtraDB Cluster. From the company, “Percona XtraDB is a Galera MySQL cluster and is an active/active high availability and high scalability open source solution for MySQL® clustering.” in English what this means is that if you are a high traffic website with a ton of content in terms of blog posts, pages, or products, you don’t need to worry about your database being slow due to this set up.

For storage hardware, the company uses HA (High Availability) web-scale SSD-based storage for “simultaneous parallel access to files from multiple application nodes”. They state that their set up here is a lot faster than conventional network attached file systems, which are already fast to begin with.

The company also has a proprietary network-based firewall that works to stop malicious activity in denial of service attacks. On top of that there’s a web application firewall which inspects HTTP requests ensuring that bad bots, brute force attacks, and other cross scripting activity is blocked. The combination of these to work together to offer incredible security for your website, something that we have seen as one of my clients was targeted by a DDOS attack which was essentially stopped in its tracks.

For monitoring, Pressidium uses NewRelic and Nagios/Icinga. They also monitor latency and check website performance. For any deviation from the norm, support is notified, and mitigation actions are taken. We've experienced this first hand, which will be discussed about in the support section of this Pressidium hosting review.

Pressidium’s leading support and service

This is one part of our Pressidium hosting review that we have a ton of experience with. This company offers an incredibly refreshing approach to hosting support. Instead of having first level support agents that don’t know what they’re talking about, you’re instantly connected with an engineer that will resolve your problem from start to finish. There’s no elevation of an issue to some higher support personnel. The support personnel also understand your business, meaning that they can provide the best quality service unique to you and your use case.

Before writing this Pressidium hosting review, we've had a ton of interaction with the support engineers, and their marketing does not lie. These guys actually know what they're talking about from start to finish. There's no elevation, and there's no need to elevate any issue as the engineer understands how Pressidium is hosting set up works.

Tickets are opened in a matter of seconds, and resolved as fast as possible. We were surprised at how quickly they were able to determine what an issue was and offer a fix for it. For example, there is hosting maintenance going on causing a 503 error (backend).

Our agency spent about an hour trying to troubleshoot this from our end. We reached out to you and support agent who immediately realized that this was not caused by an error on our end, but by the maintenance going on. They then implemented a fix which enabled the end-user to continue adding products on the backend even as serious maintenance was happening on our cluster.

Support has also reached out several times on various websites with recommendations on how to improve the speed and performance. This is proactive and was never requested by anybody on the team, but incredibly helpful and resulted in faster loading times for visitors of those websites.

The final thing that should be mentioned is that the support is available 24-7, and seeing as our team works around the clock, we've been in contact with these guys on Sunday night at 12 AM, and throughout the weekday. No matter what, we were paired with an agent that was very knowledgeable and resolve our issue as fast as possible.

This support is truly the best in class, which is a necessity if you are a larger company or agency managing a mission critical website.

The Pressidium Platform

In theory, you could just have support do absolutely everything for you, but if you’re like us, and like access to every aspect of your hosting back, the Pressidium platform offers that to you in a user-friendly interface.

You definitely don’t need to be technical to understand how to make any change to your hosting setup. tools range from analytics platforms to database management to quickly partitioning staging and production installations to domain management to easy manual backups.

There’s awesome team management, and you can invite any number of people to manage the technical side of things, billing side of things, or both.

Pressidium’s Competitors

This is a unique company because their primary target market is large enterprise level websites that require the best hardware and support in the industry. There are many other hosts that offer plans that larger websites could use, but up until now we haven't really found a company that positions itself as the solution for these companies.

We've used companies like Servebolt, Rocket.net, Cloudways, Kinsta and Pantheon.

The two companies are probably complete the most with Pressidium are Kinsta and Pantheon. Kinsta offers the same level of support, and has the hardware to back it up. Pantheon is more oriented to companies with a large in house team of developers, or agencies that manage large websites.

Pressidium stands out here in that it's primarily targeting larger installations with its pricing, offers a 100% unique solution in their own infrastructure, and has best in class support (in our opinion).

However, there are other companies that offer a more developer oriented experience. As an agency though, we have found no bottlenecks or issues when using this company.

Can I Use This Host as a Smaller, Lower Budget Website

For us, we have moved our largest projects onto this hosting platform. These companies have a happy budget, and the pricing of hosting it’s not really an issue. But for many website owners and developers, The pricing of Pressidium's services may look a bit expensive.

Interestingly enough, on the pricing page they actually hide the cheapest plan which comes in a $21 per month. This is more than the cheapest shared Hosting out there, but seeing as you're on enterprise level infrastructure for $21 a month, despite Pressidium in contention for virtually any websites hosting. With a $21 per month plan you get unlimited bandwidth, it's designed for 10,000 visitors per month, total storage of 5 GB, The same enterprise level support that comes with any of the other plans, and the performance benefits the Pressidium is known for. This includes HTTP/2 support, load balanced server clusters, the staging environment, back ups, and complete management of the entire stack including firewalls, upgrades, and more. For $21 per month, you can sleep easy knowing that your WordPress website will always be available to customers around the world, loading as fast as possible.

The second cheapest plan comes in at $42 per month, and it's probably what you should be looking at if you have a medium sized website that is mission critical to your company. With a come roughly 30,000 views per month, a total storage of 10 GB, and the ability to install three WordPress websites.

So far we’ve never come up on the supposed page view limit, so I’m not sure how the company would handle the overage. However, they mentioned several times that this is more of a suggestion rather than a hard limit and you can go over this if necessary without upgrading your plan.

With these two pricing points, this host falls in line with some of the other premium WordPress hosts out there in terms of what they offer in the target market of these lower-cost plans. Of course, this company is more focused on the larger WordPress installations, and are happy to create custom plans, but it’s not like you can’t use this if you don’t have a massive budget for hosting.

Would we? If I was a small business owner that needed a website up 100% of the time, required access to 24-7 support that actually knew what they were talking about, and wanted to make sure that my website was on the best possible infrastructure resulting in the lowest loading times possible, I would be on Pressidium (over any other company without a doubt).

Other Pricing Plans

Pricing varies wildly depending on what you’re looking for. Preasales support is great, and pointed us to the best plan by asking about the expected traffic, industry and a few other questions.

Conclusion

This concludes our Pressidium WordPress hosting review. It’s a great service, bolstered by incredible (and unique) hardware, software, backend platforms and support. With pricing as low as $21 per month, it’s something to consider for any website, but one of the best for larger setups.