After a year of testing hosting options, we moved every customer site onto cloud-based hosting, where each site runs on its own Virtual Private Server rather than sharing space with thousands of others on one physical machine.
The upside was immediate: dedicated CPU, RAM, and bandwidth per site, resources that can scale up with little or no downtime when a marketing campaign or traffic spike hits, and hosting located close to wherever your customers actually are — one customer in San Francisco saw a 3-second improvement in load time from server location alone. It also meant better containment: if one site on a shared server gets compromised, cloud hosting keeps that problem isolated to that one site rather than spreading.
For EU customers this also meant data could stay within the EU, and for our Finnish customers, within Finland — flexibility that shared hosting never really offered.
