Is Convesio the Next-Generation of Managed WordPress Hosting?

Disclosure: WP Mayor is a professional review site that sometimes receives compensation from companies to promote their products. Each product is tested and our honest opinions are shared publicly. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed below are our own.

As your agency starts to take off and the five client sites you were working with suddenly become 50 or more, you’ll find that little tasks you were once able to comfortably manage starts costing your business time and money. From dealing with inconsistent server performance to taking calls on weekends when a client’s site has gone down, these non-billables are burdens you shouldn’t have to manage.

Enter: Convesio.

Convesio is a new Docker-powered managed WordPress hosting solution; the first self-healing, autoscaling, platform-as-a-service for creating and managing WordPress sites.

Borne out of founder Tom Fanelli’s search for a managed hosting solution at his design agency, Convesio offers features and tools designed with creative and digital businesses in mind, from high availability and zero points of failure to automated backups and a centralized dashboard for managing all of your client sites in one place.

Convesio markets itself as “next-generation” managed WordPress hosting that provides the kind of high availability hosting that typically costs $1,400+ per month, but starting at just $10 per month.

Sounds too good to be true? Let’s check out the details.

A New Docker-Powered Managed WordPress Solution for WordPress

When you’re working with multiple client sites, anything less than world-class managed WordPress hosting is a disaster waiting to happen. It means your clients’ sites are vulnerable and could break under the strain of traffic brought on by a viral post, or even go down because of a single point of failure.

Agencies need hosting that is redundant, provides automated backups, and can quickly and easily scale at a moment’s notice — all without costing an arm and a leg.

Convesio delivers all of these things and more, providing a number of agency-focused features while also removing the complexity that accompanies managing server infrastructure:

• High availability. Load balanced containers distribute traffic to duplicate instances of WordPress, ensuring your client sites are always online. And if any of your sites go offline for whatever reason, the platform instantly re-deploys your container.
• Auto-scaling. If any of your sites get hammered with traffic, multiple containers are automatically deployed to handle the load.
• Automated backups. Schedule backups to run from every 3 hours, up to every 15 days.
• Secure. WordPress-specific security monitoring, scanning, and custom-built malware detection.
• Fast caching. Caching is delivered through a custom-built caching layer at the platform level, so there’s no need to manage caching for client sites.
  To understand how these features could benefit your agency, let’s put them into an agency context.

Hosting outages during a critical time are unacceptable. If you’ve ever experienced downtime during a holiday sales period — Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other important holidays — you can trust that this won’t happen with Convesio.

Say, for example, you’ve got a dozen client sites running WooCommerce and it’s Black Friday. When those sites are hit with huge surges of traffic, Convesio’s load balanced Docker containers kick in, distributing traffic and auto-scaling to keep things running smoothly. With fast caching, shoppers will be able to browse products and checkout quickly. And for added peace of mind, you can schedule backups to run as frequently as you like.

Removing Single Points of Failure in WordPress

WordPress, like any other piece of software, is fallible. If the cache breaks on a WordPress site, the whole site breaks down. If code in a WordPress core update doesn’t play well with code in a third-party plugin, again, the whole site breaks.

Similarly, traditional managed WordPress hosting solutions, such as shared and VPS hosting, are prone to single points of failure.

With shared hosting, there are thousands of sites on each server. This means if any single site goes viral, gets hacked, or falls victim to a DDoS attack, every site on the server is affected.

While VPS does offer some isolation from other sites on the same server, it doesn’t protect your sites from hardware failures or another site’s traffic overwhelming the VPS. In addition, the vast majority of VPS solutions still run on one server with one database instance.

Creative and digital agencies shouldn’t have to deal with single points of failure. After all, these are hosting concerns — problems that hosting providers should be mitigating.

Convesio’s hosting architecture addresses all of these single points of failure and more, through a combination of open source software and proprietary code. Their container-based approach means your sites aren’t just isolated from bad neighbors on the same server, but new containers can be instantly spun up — complete with an up-to-date version of your client site — to load balance traffic to your site. Containers can be created on multiple servers, sharing the load and eliminating any single point of failure.

Case Study: How Convesio Solved M&M Multimedia’s Performance and Reliability Concerns

Convesio is currently in beta, but there are several agencies already benefiting from this next-generation Docker-powered managed WordPress hosting solution.

M&M Multimedia is one such agency. Launched in 2009, the integrated digital marketing company offers a comprehensive suite of digital services, including web design and development, content and email marketing, SEO and PPC, graphic design, and social media strategy.

The agency has 100 client sites on its books, which were previously spread across various hosting platforms and technologies, making site management difficult.

Since migrating all of their sites to Convesio, M&M Multimedia’s client sites have experienced zero downtime and page load time faster than anything founder Mike Haley ever experienced with other managed hosting solutions. Now, he no longer has to deal with unreliable server performance, slow sites during peak times, or slow response times to support requests — Convesio has eliminated all of those problems.

“Switching to Convesio has completely freed me from having to deal with site performance issues and clients upset about downtime,” Haley says.

“Convesio’s support team is the best in the industry. They treat me like I treat my clients — they respond fast, I can email, text, call, and they are on any issue. They adapt to the way I do business and help with any issue that comes up.

“In Convesio, we’ve found a like-minded company that just gets it. They know and understand what we need to support our client sites.”

WordPress Hosting Designed with Agencies in Mind

If you’ve been running your agency for several years and you’re managing a number of client sites, you’ve probably tried a handful of hosting companies, tons of caching plugins, and countless tools to help streamline your processes. Typically, the result of these experiments is a mess of sites spread across different hosting platforms and technology, with varying levels of performance and stability.

Convesio, as I mentioned earlier, is the result of founder Tom Fanelli’s desire for a managed WordPress hosting solution that meets the need of agencies. After searching for affordable hosting that was redundant, offered managed backups, and could scale, he couldn’t find any that could make sure his client sites wouldn’t go down.

Fanelli understood that no matter how great your agency is, if your web hosting is bad, it reflects poorly on everything else you’re doing. If you’ve got a client worth $50,000 a year to your agency and you’ve got them on outdated hosting with old technology and their site goes down, that client is going to lose trust in you or even leave your agency.

In addition to server management, Convesio operates as a technical partner for agencies, taking care of small tasks and providing client service assistance, including launching client sites, migrations, and applying SSL certificates.

It’s this “more than just hosting” approach to managed WordPress hosting that value-adds for agencies that are trying to scale but are spending too much time on each technical tasks.

“When You Need It” Managed WordPress Hosting

With traditional hosting, it’s often the case that you’re paying more than what you’re actually using. For example, if you have a client site that gets 100,000 visitors a month and 10 other client sites that only get 2,000 visits, you end up paying for your VPS based on the capacity of the biggest site on your server. This also means undercharging and overcharging clients.

With Convesio, pricing is simple: you pay for what you use. If you have a client site that needs 10 containers, you pay for 10 containers. And if you have another client that only needs one container, you pay for 1 container.

What’s great about this pricing model that is that you only pay for what you use and nothing more — no nasty billing surprises since pricing is transparent.

What’s more, Convesio provides “when you need it” capacity, i.e. it scales with your business and clients. So as your client sites grow and need more resources and capacity, Convesio’s load balancing elastically scales, ensuring your sites always have the resources they need.

For agencies, there’s no need to configure load balancers, Docker containers, database clusters, or even get in touch to upgrade your hosting. Convesio automates the entire process, making it simple and seamless to scale up sites.

Convesio: Next-Generation Managed Hosting for WordPress

Is Convesio the future of managed WordPress hosting? When it comes to managed hosting solutions for agencies, there are few quality options available, and certainly none quite like Convesio.

Convesio offers innovations beyond what traditional managed WordPress hosts are currently providing — a breath of fresh air in a space that needs some shaking up. With is high availability, scalability, and pay-as-you-go pricing, it might well be the unicorn hosting you need for client sites.

Convesio is launching its new container-based managed WordPress hosting soon. If you’re interested in seeing what it can do for your client site, join the beta phase.