Today, Carson, one of the owner’s of Wealthy Affiliate, announced that Wealthy Affiliate will soon be releasing into production a new feature which they called SiteSpeed. From what I could gather from his post, it sounded like it’s something like a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for their hosting platform.
Purpose of SiteSpeed
In case you didn’t feel like reading the link I provided, they implemented SiteSpeed with a goal of making WordPress sites hosted on SiteRubix the fastest websites around. Whether or not they reach that goal remains to be seen, it seems rather subjective to me and hard to prove because you would have to compare WordPress page loading times on all of the web hosts out there.
How SiteSpeed Works
They were a little sparse on the details. They mentioned that it would be caching website content and serving it. By doing this they avoid the time it takes for PHP to run, for the database to be queried, and the web server to respond to the requests.
They also mentioned it was some type of hardware and that it would help prevent against DDoS attacks. Usually one of the major selling points of CDNs is the ability to defend against DDoS attacks, so that’s why I’m leaning towards it just being some sort of CDN.
Did They Just Implement CloudFlare?
I actually don’t know the answer to this question yet. I’m inclined to say that they are not using CloudFlare’s service and just calling it SiteSpeed because in his post he describes SiteSpeed as being “similar to services like CloudFlare.” If they were using CloudFlare, I don’t think they would have posted that statement.
Once they take it out of beta and launch it into production I’ll probably fire up WireShark, visit my websites, and take a look at the ip address where all of my website content is coming from. I’ll be sure to update this post when I do.
Initial Feedback
As part of their announcement, Wealthy Affiliate asked for 100 volunteers to allow them to enable SiteSpeed on their websites. A couple of people have replied in the comments with the results they received. Basically, they have been testing their website loading times with Google Page Insights before and after they turn on SiteSpeed. Of the people that have posted their results, most of them have reported significant jumps in their scores after turning on SiteSpeed.
Final Thoughts
Normally, I write a little bit more, but I don’t have anything more to say. Overall, I’m pretty excited about this addition. I’m all for anything that is going to make my websites faster. I’m also happy to see that Wealthy Affiliate is continuing to improve their SiteRubix hosting platform.
With the way they are building out the SiteRubix platform, I think SiteRubix is really going to be one of the things that draws people to become a premium member of Wealthy Affiliate.
If you compare the resources that you are given for a SiteRubix site to the different plans that WPengine offers, you quickly see that you would have to spend $249/month on WPengine’s Business plan to match the number of websites, number of visits per month, and amount of local storage that Wealthy Affiliate offers all of their premium members through their SiteRubix hosting platform.
It looks like Wealthy Affiliate is looking to compete with the big dogs in the Managed WordPress Hosting arena. I think they have a great set of complimentary services to enable them to do well. Not only have they built a great hosting platform, but they have also built an even better training platform that teaches you how to market your WordPress websites. At most web hosting companies they just rent you the website space and you have to fend for yourself when it comes to learn how to promote your websites.