At Hostinger, we seek to deliver the best web hosting service for our customers, with faster website performance, better uptime, and innovative technologies to help you achieve online success. This is why our Research and Development team has been working on a new web hosting solution, which will provide better performance, in a simplified format.
In this post, we’ll introduce the idea and technology behind Hostinger’s next-generation web hosting solution prototype.
Idea and Innovation
Our goal is to improve four components of web hosting:
- Uptime – providing a highly available solution resilient to scaling, hardware failure, and maintenance time.
- Speed – reducing the time needed for website response, account creation, and data transfer.
- Simplicity – reducing moving parts and using only proven solutions.
- Base price – keeping the cost low and making the solution available for all customers.
Coming up with a new solution would require a lot of time and resources. Most hosting providers wouldn’t do this, especially when you can buy third-party solutions to rely on.
Fortunately, we don’t have to do this from the ground up.
There are plenty of great micro solutions for containerization and database systems, proxies, caches, and accelerators. We identified which aspects of each system could be beneficial for our solution and put them together in a new architecture.
The Technology Behind It
Our new web hosting solution will use separate units for different roles:
- Management nodes cluster for APIs and helper systems.
- Compute nodes cluster for containers and filesystem.
- Database nodes cluster.
This architecture helps maintain high availability when individual servers go offline, as the nodes inside the cluster can work interchangeably to ensure maximum uptime.
As for the system, it will utilize lightweight containers, a smart replicating filesystem (based on BetterFS), and a custom-built Nginx web server that will feature:
- Optimized Zlib compression, 22%-29% faster than the default
- The QUIC protocol and HTTP3 support
- Brotli data compression support
- Custom performance patches
Combining these technologies and architectures will result in web hosting with better performance and high uptime.
Performance
We created a micro-scale buildout using 16 Intel NUC computers to imitate a data center cabinet with servers. Then, we conducted a test to compare its performance with our current web hosting solution.
We tested the system with different-sized production websites. The websites loaded faster than the same LiteSpeed-based WordPress websites that have maximum optimization, including LiteSpeed plugin tweaks, CSS/JS minification, and other compression options.
Also, the tested websites in the new system scored 99-100 on PageSpeed Insights without cache enabled. Having enabled the cache, they will consistently score 100.
Roadmap and Accessibility
This next-generation web hosting will release a beta version within the next OKR quarter. The implementation timeline includes data center logistics and hPanel integration.
Once the system is ready, it will most likely be available as a specially-crafted WordPress hosting offer. In the meantime, existing customers won’t be affected by the changes and can still use our services as usual. Also, we aim to keep the price at the same level as our current WordPress hosting to provide more benefits to our customers without incurring extra costs.
