This year our Platform team (known for our fun project names like “Must Write Faster” and “Maneki Neko”) did a ton of work to bring incremental improvements to your hosting experience, as well as the stability and performance of your sites! 

While you may not notice the difference bit by bit, over the course of a year we added up to be quite impactful for almost every site. It’s just one more way we always put your sites first! 

Check out this recap on just some of the impactful work our team has done during 2020.

Right-Sizing Customer Resources

One of the best ways we can support your sites is by making sure our systems are set up in a way to meaningfully assign and correct the resources allocated to each and every one of your sites! As a part of this effort we took a look at how our Central Processing Units (CPU) and memory were allocated. 

With the data-driven work in this project we optimized the resources each site received in order to assure your sites have the best performance. The best part? If we detect the site is approaching available resource limits, we’ll automatically reallocate resources with no downtime!

Faster Storage

Another area of opportunity we identified for site performance was storage! To give you faster and more efficient performance from our storage solutions, we’ve upgraded them to solid-state drives (SSD) compared to hard drive disks (HDD). With these storage updates, we’re better able to scale the storage you need based on your rolling site data. This means you can build, deploy, and make changes to your sites faster!

CPU Architecture

By working with our infrastructure partners, we explored a new, higher-performing CPU architecture. We spent time comparing the speed and performance of different infrastructures and operating systems, and came to a clear winner! After extensive testing we found performance increases up to a 10% across all kinds of commands run on your sites. Sites on the Flywheel Cloud Platform have been upgraded to this improved CPU architecture!

WordPress Enhancement for Plugin update performance (Coming soon!)

Expected to launch early next year, we made improvements to some of our plugin processes. Updating your plugins is super important for your site performance and security, and we wanted to make sure nothing stands in the way of you keeping them up-to-date!

After monitoring the plugin update process, we identified specific infrastructures that caused slow updates. With a little research and a lot of testing, we improved the infrastructure to make the WordPress plugin updates process an average of 50% faster!

And those are just the big takeaways! Our platform team tackled a bunch of other projects in 2020, and we’re constantly looking for ways to improve your WordPress hosting experience with Flywheel and keep your sites performing their best. If you have any questions or ideas, feel free to reach out! We love hearing your feedback.

Want to see what else we did in 2020? Check out our full year-in-review!