Performance guide · Cambridge
Cambridge: your readers are not in Cambridge
A spin-out here is often selling to California before the second room is furnished. The site has to be quick for people eight time zones away, and most advice quietly assumes it does not.
The short answer
Decide which audience you are optimising for before you change anything: the indicative round trip to our London origin is 5-15 ms from the UK, 70-90 ms from the US East Coast and 130-150 ms from the West Coast. Cached pages survive all three; anything uncacheable pays the full distance every time.
HostingFast serves from London on NVMe behind LiteSpeed, which caches documentation and marketing pages without loading PHP and is a sensible origin to place an edge network in front of. Entry pricing is $2.42 a month billed annually.
By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 12 August 2026
99.9%
Uptime target, credited
24/7
Cover eight zones away
Free
TLS, renewed automatically
NVMe
Storage on every tier
The documentation is the sales team here, and it is usually read at three in the morning local time by somebody eight time zones away who arrived from a search result rather than your home page.
So this page starts with geography, because for once it matters, then covers what a documentation-led site can and cannot cache, then a measurement protocol you can repeat, and finally the domain question that comes up in every seed round.
Your readers are eight time zones away
Indicative round trips to a London origin on a well-connected consumer line: 5-15 ms from the UK and Ireland, 10-35 ms across western and northern Europe, 70-90 ms from the US East Coast and eastern Canada, and 130-150 ms from the US West Coast. Ranges rather than guarantees, and a visitor's own carrier shifts them as much as distance does.
Read those against your analytics rather than your ambitions. A cached page absorbs 130 ms without much complaint; a page that runs three uncached requests in sequence turns the same distance into something a reader notices.
Documentation caches; almost nothing else does
Docs, changelogs, blog posts and pricing pages are identical for every visitor and change only when you publish, which makes them ideal cache candidates. A LiteSpeed hit serves them without loading PHP at all — verify with the x-litespeed-cache header on the document request rather than assuming.
What is not cacheable is anything with a session: a trial dashboard, a gated whitepaper, a data-room link, a waitlist form that echoes state back. Keep those off the critical path of the pages that have to impress, and cut their query count because that is the only lever left.
A measurement protocol you can repeat
Fix the variables: the same three URLs, the same tool, the same connection, three runs with the median kept, and a throttled mobile profile for one of them. Write the result somewhere durable. A protocol you follow every fortnight beats a heroic optimisation session once a year.
Then add the field data. Search Console reports the 75th percentile of real visits over a rolling 28-day window, which is the only measurement that includes the reviewer opening your docs on hotel wifi in Palo Alto.
The domain question in every seed round
.co.uk says British; .com says nothing about geography, which is often the point when the buyer is American. Plenty of spin-outs hold both, serve one and 301 the other so a single name accumulates the search authority.
Either way, register it on the same account as the hosting so the DNS is aimed correctly and the mail records are handled at the same time. Then flatten the chain: a CNAME pointing at a CNAME adds a lookup in front of every cold visit, and dig +trace will show you what you actually built.
An origin worth putting an edge in front of
NVMe storage with LiteSpeed compiled into the web server, a London datacentre, and a deliberately low accounts-per-server count. A CDN in front of a slow origin only caches slowness faster, which is why the origin is the part worth getting right first.
SSH with Git and Composer, WP-CLI, staging copies and per-site PHP versions come with the account. Entry pricing is $2.42 a month billed annually and renews at the same figure.
- .co.uk or .com registered and renewed with the plan
- Cached pages that hold their speed at distance
- SSH, Git, Composer and WP-CLI on the account
- A renewal rate identical to the first term
Why HostingFast
Standard on every plan
Published latency ranges
Round trips are stated by region as indicative ranges, so an international audience can be planned for rather than hand-waved at.
Caching that suits documentation
Logged-out pages are answered from LiteSpeed before PHP loads, which is the exact profile of a docs-led company site.
An origin that stands up
NVMe and a low accounts-per-server count keep origin responses quick, which is what makes an edge network worth adding.
Tooling a technical team expects
SSH with Git and Composer, WP-CLI, staging copies and per-site PHP versions, all without raising a ticket.
Flat pricing in USD
Entry pricing is $2.42 a month billed annually, renewing at the same figure, which is convenient when the board deck is in dollars.
Uptime with a credit attached
A 99.9% target under constant monitoring with a pro-rated credit if a month falls short — a number that survives due diligence.
Quick Start
From order to online
- 1
Check where your readers are
Session geography first. Every decision below depends on it, and the assumption in the room is usually wrong by a wide margin.
- 2
Confirm the docs are cached
Sample the cache header across real documentation URLs. A miss on a static page is a configuration fault worth fixing today.
- 3
Fix the protocol, not just the site
Same URLs, same tool, three runs, median, one throttled. Recorded somewhere you will find it next quarter.
- 4
Add the edge for the distant share
With a quick origin in place, a CDN handles the transatlantic audience — and confirm the gain in the field report, not in a single run.
Built In
Loaded onto every plan
- Session geography checked before any optimisation decision
- Cache hit confirmed on documentation and marketing pages
- A repeatable measurement protocol, written down
- DNS chain checked with dig and flattened where possible
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer-focused plans
- Staging environments for testing changes before they ship
- Free SSL that renews itself before it can lapse
- A daily backup you can restore yourself between two measurement runs
- NVMe SSD storage on every tier, not just the expensive ones
- 99.9% uptime as the target, with a pro-rated credit when a month misses
Frequently Asked
What people ask us most often
Should we host in the US if most of our readers are there?
Only if most of your traffic is uncacheable, which for a documentation-led site it usually is not. Cached HTML served from an edge node near the reader gets you most of the benefit while keeping a quick origin for your own team and your European audience. Read the session split before committing to a move that is hard to reverse.
What is the cheapest way to look credible to an investor?
A domain, one page that explains the science without a marketing adjective in it, and mail on that domain rather than a free provider. Entry pricing is $2.42 a month billed annually, which is less than the coffee budget for a single pitch meeting. What actually costs you credibility is that page taking four seconds to appear on a partner's phone in California, so measure it from there before you spend anything on the logo.
How often should we re-measure?
Every fortnight, or every deploy if you ship less often than that. Performance does not collapse, it drifts — one plugin, one embedded video, one third-party script at a time — and a repeated cheap measurement catches drift while a rare thorough audit does not.
Do we need .com, or is .co.uk enough?
It depends who is reading. .co.uk is unambiguous about where you are, which is an advantage domestically and a neutral-to-negative signal to some overseas buyers. Holding both and redirecting one with a 301 is the common answer, and both register and renew on the same account as the hosting.
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A London origin on NVMe behind LiteSpeed, published latency ranges, and the tooling a technical team expects to find.
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