Canadian Web Hosting Done Right

As of May 2022 we use MariaDB 10.5 on all servers.

Please see the MariaDB Knowledgebase for differences / incompatibilities between MariaDB and MySQL.

As of Aug 2022, we support PHP 7.4, 8.0, and 8.1.

Versions 5.6, 7.0-7.3 are available on some servers, but discouraged.

All supported versions are kept updated to the latest point releases. We default to PHP 7.4 or 8.0 and you have the option to change to a lower or higher version, when available.

Due to known security issues with using memory caching services like memcached or redis on shared servers, we do not use memcached to improve performance on our shared servers. You are welcome to use it or redis on a VPS.

For WordPress on shared hosting we use and recommend (and pre-install) the free file-based object caching solution Docket Cache.

You can read more about the utilities we use for performance improvement in the "What makes us better..." section above, including custom nginx rules to work with common WordPress caching plugins and the option to enable nginx level caching.

No. Because CDNs do not always result in faster performance, and because they make troubleshooting issues much more complex, we do not automatically enable any CDN services.

Our security solutions are pre-configured to work with CloudFlare.

Read more about this here.

Yes, you can configure branded nameservers. Please keep in mind that if you do this, all DNS/Name Server/IP changes are entirely up to you to apply.

Yes all of our services (except Exchange Mail) are hosted on SSDs in RAID5 or RAID1 with at least 2x read performance improvement and single drive failure tolerance.

Some are hosted on SSDs with NVMe connectivity for even greater IO performance.

Most websites don't see improvements from the read/write speed advantages of SSDs because read/write speeds are rarely maxed out; this is particularly true when using a RAID, which most hosts do. It's primarily the dramatic improvement in IOPS that SSDs provide that ensures top performance.

Although NVMe connected SSDs will result in faster read/write performance for the operating system as a whole, website load times are not commonly dramatically improved. Instead you might see minor improvements during peak times.

• Subdomains: You may use unlimited subdomains on all hosting plans.
• Databases: The number of databases is listed under each plan above.
• Database Sizes: There is no explicit table or database size limit, however if the size of your database begins to impede performance on a shared server, we'll let you know that you will need to pare down the size of the database by finding the cause of the increase in size and fixing it, or upgrade to a VPS to continue hosting the database on our shared hosting. With WordPress, a database greater than roughly 500MB - 1GB typically begins to impede server performance.
• Outgoing Mail Limits: There are limits on the number of messages you're allowed to send each hour. See our knowledge base article for the current limits and what is considered acceptable use of our mail services.

No, but we have better alternatives!

We've been using Plesk, an alternative to cPanel, since our inception in 2004. We find it to be a simpler to use and more powerful control panel that better integrates with the host Operating System.

We use Installatron to power our 1-click web apps utility. Installatron has less overall web scripts available, but offers a better user interface over Softaculous along with more functionality.

We do our own disaster recovery backups, but we do strongly recommend setting up your own backups. You can configure application-level backups or account-wide backups within Plesk and set them up to backup to the cloud service of your choice, like OneDrive or Dropbox. Read more on configuring backups here.

We allow between 3 and 5 active simultaneous PHP processes per domain. Should your site make use of all of those processes simultaneously for a lengthy period of time (e.g.: 3+ hours) and that CPU usage detrimentally affect the performance of the server, your domain may be reduced to 1 active process until you're able to reduce its CPU usage or transition to a VPS for more resources.

Important note: if you use static page caching, and we strongly recommend that you do, website requests will never need to reach dynamic PHP processes for the majority (or all) of your website visitors. Here's how to enable static page caching with WordPress. With caching enabled and a well optimized site you can achieve up to 100k page views daily and up to at least 3,000 simultaneous visitors (as per Google Analytics) without any detrimental effects or changes to the number of PHP processes available to your site.

Yes, we do. We have a triple layer of protection on our servers to protect their IP reputation:

1. Outbound mail volume limitations

Plesk helps ensure we limit the number of messages that can be sent per hour and per day from each domain. We set these limits to sane values such that very few of our customers ever reach them, but also so that if an account should begin emitting spam, very few spam messages make it out in any given hour or day.

2. Outbound mail relay spam scanner

For the messages that do make it past our volume limitations, they're all scanned by a custom mail relay that checks the messages for spam content and drops anything overly suspicious.

3. IP reputation and blacklist reports

We receive notifications every 24 hours pertaining to our SMTP servers' reputation from the 3rd party mail scanning utility MX Toolbox. Should their excellent standing drop over time, we'll be made aware and act fast to resolve the issue.

Performance

Our servers are centrally located just outside of Montreal, Canada. With OVH's redundant backbone network, we get fantastic performance (super-low TTFB) to all of North America (30-60ms) and even the UK (70ms)!

Astoundingly, our server performance optimizations are so good that our users in New Zealand - the nearly-literal opposite side of the globe - find our hosting services faster than most NZ hosts.

Privacy & Security

Having your data in Canada means that alongside proper use of secure protocols, the legal system of other countries can’t overreach to gain access to your data; it’s subject only to Canadian laws, which for the time being are a bit more strict than US laws when it comes to privacy.

Canadian Dollars

Everyone pays in Canadian dollars, so if you're Canadian you're not losing 25-30% by paying in USD.

If you're American, get up to 30% extra buying power in the exchange from USD to CAD.

General performance varies considerably from site to site as it very much depends on the functionality you're using.

For example WordPress with highly dynamic plugins like WooCommerce and LearnDash will add to the site's load times regardless of where the site is hosted.

As of Apr 2022 we clocked a fresh WordPress install on our shared hosting with WP Super Cache (static page cache) and Docket Cache (object caching) enabled with the following load times:

• 45ms front-end
• 285ms back-end

If you wish to compare with your existing host, try installing WordPress fresh with the above-noted configuration to a sub-domain or test domain to compare.