Canadian Web Hosting Done Right

As of January 1, 2022 we use MariaDB 10.2 on our CentOS 7 servers and MariaDB 10.3 or 10.4 on our CentOS 8 servers. By April 2022 all servers will be using MariaDB 10.4 or higher.

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

As of Jan 2022, we support PHP 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, and 8.1.

Versions 5.6, 7.0-7.2 are available on some servers, but discouraged.

All 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 memcached on shared servers, we do not use memcached to improve performance on our shared servers. You are welcome to use it  on a VPS.

You can read 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, as it has a Plesk addon to assist with this.

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.

Note that website hosting doesn't really obtain major advantages from the read/write speed advantages of SSDs -- they're typically heavily underutilized. It's primarily the dramatic improvement in IOPS that ensures top performance.

• 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.

Our servers are centrally located just outside of Montreal, Canada. With OVH's excellent redundant backbone network,  we get excellent 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 almost-literal opposite side of the globe - find our hosting services faster than most NZ hosts.