With all of our customers now migrated to new servers we would like to showcase one of the underlying technologies of our next generation hosting platform that gives an incredible performance boost to your websites.
LiteSpeed is a highly efficient, commercial web server and replacement for the popular Apache web server used by most hosting companies.
We selected LiteSpeed for our next generation platform as it is up to 9 times faster than Apache when serving static content, 3 times faster when serving secure SSL connections and up to 50% faster when serving PHP requests. It is also one of the first web servers to support the new HTTP/2 protocol.
What’s really cool about LiteSpeed is that it includes a powerful server side cache that can supercharge your website, making it load hundreds of times faster and reach many more visitors.
In fact, benchmark tests show WordPress loading over 4000 times faster on our new platform when LiteSpeed Cache is enabled!
Varial Hosting customers can easily speed up their WordPress sites by installing this simple plugin or by purchasing one of our optimized WordPress hosting plans.
We are excited to announce that all Varial Hosting customers are now being hosted from servers physically located in our new Saskatoon data center.
When developing our next generation hosting platform it quickly became apparent that having our servers closer to home would help us scale and deploy new features faster. With websites loading thousands of times faster on our new platform we wanted all customers to reap its rewards so we spent the past year and a half carefully migrating clients to new servers and relocating equipment from Montreal to Saskatoon.
With this work completed we are thrilled to now have all of our web hosting services be provided from our hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.
With this exciting news, we have also partnered with a global content delivery network allowing all customers to speed up their websites by distributing content across 100 data centers throughout the world. When enabled, international visitors will be served content from the data center closest to their location, reducing loading times for a truly global solution.
Stay tuned as we have many exciting new features to reveal in the coming weeks!
FUZE Conference 2017 is just one week away and we are thrilled to be the web hosting sponsor of the event for the fourth year in a row!
FUZE will be held at TCU Place in Saskatoon on Wednesday, May 17th. This year’s conference is focused on helping marketing professionals navigate economic uncertainty and a changing political landscape.
This year’s speakers include:
- Meena Sandhu (UBC)
- Albert Jame (zu)
- Nykea Behiel (Vendasta)
- Andrew Chau and Jeff Adamson (SkipTheDishes)
We hope to see you there!
Now that the migration of all customers from our Zeus server to our new Sirius server has been completed we are making plans to shutdown and decommission our old Zeus server.
On Monday, May 22, 2017 we will stop all services that are running on our Zeus server.
If you are using a 3rd party DNS service to point your domains to our servers and have not yet updated your IP address from 108.163.168.170 to 69.27.124.150 to complete the migration, your service will cease to function on this date until this change is made.
Similarly any attempts to directly connect to Zeus’ IP address 108.163.168.170 after May 22nd will no longer function.
All data will be wiped from the server on Monday, May 29th when Zeus is fully taken out of service.
The transfer of all customers from our Zeus server to our new Sirius server has been completed.
If your domain names are connected to our name server addresses ns1.varialhosting.com, ns2.varialhosting.com, ns3.varialhosting.com and ns4.varialhosting.com (or our older diy-dns.com or diywebhosting.ca name servers), your migration was fully automated and no action is required of you. Your domains will begin to resolve to the new server within 24 hours.
If you are using a 3rd party DNS service to point your domains to our servers you must manually update your IP address from 108.163.168.170 to 69.27.124.150 to complete the migration. This change should be made immediately to avoid an interruption of your service.
Over the coming weeks we will begin to add many exciting new features to bring our Sirius server inline with the feature set of our next generation hosting platform.
If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at support@varialhosting.com for assistance.