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Performance guide · Liverpool

Liverpool: your audience is not where you are

Two clubs with followings on six continents and a cruise terminal on the waterfront. Optimising for a local visitor when half your traffic is transatlantic is the wrong problem.

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The short answer

Work out where your visitors actually are before you tune anything, because the answer changes what matters: a UK visitor is 5-15 ms from our London origin, a US East Coast visitor is 70-90 ms, and the West Coast is 130-150 ms. Cached pages survive that; uncached ones do not.

HostingFast serves from London on NVMe behind LiteSpeed, which is the right origin for a British audience and the right origin to put an edge network in front of for everyone else. SSL, migration and daily backups are included.

By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 12 August 2026

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Open the analytics on a site here and the session map is normally wider than the city: a fixture read in another hemisphere, a booking made in a timezone you are asleep in, an enquiry from a continent you do not sell to yet. Distance is a real term in the equation rather than a footnote to it.

So the honest version of this page starts with geography rather than ending with it, then draws the line between what an edge network can fix and what it cannot, and finishes on how to prove a change with data from real visitors instead of one test run.

Where your visitors are, in milliseconds

Indicative round trips to a London origin on a well-connected consumer line: the UK and Ireland at 5-15 ms, western and northern Europe at 10-35 ms, the US East Coast and eastern Canada at 70-90 ms, and the US West Coast at 130-150 ms. Those are ranges, not guarantees, and your visitor's own carrier moves them as much as distance does.

Read them against your analytics rather than in the abstract. If four fifths of your sessions are British, the London origin is already the best answer available. If a third are North American, the next section is the one that matters.

What an edge network fixes, and what it never will

A CDN handles images, CSS, JavaScript and fonts from a node near the visitor, and it will serve cached HTML — which covers nearly every page a logged-out visitor opens. It also absorbs traffic spikes, because a cached response never troubles the origin at all.

It does nothing for the WordPress dashboard, which is logged-in and therefore never cached. Nothing for checkout and account screens, for the same reason. Nothing for a database query that misses the cache. And nothing for file manager, SSH or FTP sessions, which always speak straight to the origin.

The origin still decides your worst pages

Which means the pages your international visitors complain about are the uncacheable ones, and they are paying the full round trip plus your application's own execution time. Cutting the number of queries on those pages is worth more to a visitor in Boston than any edge configuration.

NVMe storage and a low accounts-per-server count keep that execution short. So does choosing a current PHP version per site and keeping the autoloaded options row from growing unchecked — both are free, and both help every visitor regardless of continent.

Prove it with field data, not a single run

A test from your desk in Liverpool tells you about Liverpool. Search Console's Core Web Vitals report reads real visits at the 75th percentile over a rolling 28-day window, which is the only measurement that includes the person on hotel wifi in Chicago.

Ship the change, wait, then read it. If the field number moves and the lab number did not, trust the field number — it is the one made of customers.

An aisle of racks inside the London datacentre

A London origin, chosen deliberately

The datacentre is in London because that is where the audience for most of these sites is. NVMe storage, LiteSpeed caching in the web server and a low accounts-per-server count are what make the origin quick enough to sit behind an edge network without becoming its bottleneck.

SSL is free and renews itself, migration is free and runs with your old site still live, and there is no setup charge at any tier.

  • .co.uk registered and renewed alongside the plan
  • Cached pages that hold their speed at distance
  • Free SSL, free migration, no setup fee
  • Engineers on shift in every timezone

Why HostingFast

Standard on every plan

An origin worth putting an edge in front of

NVMe and server-level caching keep origin responses quick, which is what stops a CDN from simply caching a slow page faster.

Honest latency figures

Indicative round trips are published by region rather than replaced by a claim that everything is fast everywhere.

Uptime with a credit attached

A 99.9% target under constant monitoring, with a pro-rated credit if a month falls short — useful when the audience never sleeps.

Support in every timezone

Engineers on shift around the clock, first reply inside two hours and inside one when a site is down.

Free migration, measured

The old site keeps serving while the copy runs here, so you can compare both before delegation moves.

Flat USD pricing

Plans bill in USD at a rate that renews unchanged, which is convenient when your revenue arrives in several currencies.

Quick Start

From order to online

  1. 1

    Read your analytics first

    Find out where the sessions actually come from. Every decision below depends on that split, and most people guess it wrong.

  2. 2

    Widen cache coverage

    Cached HTML is what survives distance. Fix the exclusions and cookies causing misses before you consider an edge network.

  3. 3

    Add the edge, then measure

    Put a CDN in front for the international share and confirm the improvement with field data rather than a test from your own desk.

  4. 4

    Cut queries on what cannot be cached

    Checkout, accounts and search still run the full distance. Fewer queries is the only lever that helps them.

Built In

Loaded onto every plan

  • Session geography checked before any optimisation decision
  • Cache hit ratio sampled across real URLs, not just the home page
  • Uncacheable pages profiled for query count
  • Free SSL that renews itself before it can lapse
  • A daily backup restored from the panel in minutes, not from a support queue
  • Free migration by our engineers, with the old host left serving as a control
  • Human support on duty every hour of every day
  • NVMe SSD storage on every tier, not just the expensive ones
  • Zero setup charges — there is no joining fee, ever
  • 99.9% uptime as the target, monitored around the clock

Frequently Asked

What people ask us most often

Should I host closer to my overseas visitors instead?

Only if the majority of them are there and your pages are largely uncacheable. Otherwise you would be trading a fast origin for your British audience against a marginal gain abroad that a CDN delivers anyway. Read the session split first — for most Liverpool businesses the UK share is far larger than the assumption in the room.

What does the entry plan actually include?

NVMe storage behind LiteSpeed caching, free SSL that renews itself, free migration, a daily backup, mailboxes on your own domain and first-year domain registration on annual terms. Entry pricing is $2.42 a month billed annually, and the renewal rate is the same figure.

Why is our shop's checkout slower for American customers than the catalogue?

Because the catalogue can be cached at an edge node near them and checkout cannot. Every checkout request travels to the origin and runs the full application path, so it pays the round trip plus your execution time. Reducing queries and third-party calls in that flow is the only thing that helps.

How long before a change shows up in the field data?

The Core Web Vitals report uses a rolling 28-day window, so a change shipped today is diluted by four weeks of history before it is fully visible. Keep the lab measurements for the immediate signal and treat the field report as confirmation a few weeks later.

Keep reading

Changing hosts? Run through our checklist first.

A straightforward sequence for a switch your visitors never feel: which files move first, how to shift email across without losing a single message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two mistakes behind almost all the downtime we get asked to rescue.

You'll get the checklist email, then occasional pointers on keeping a site running fast. Unsubscribe the moment you want out — the privacy policy covers the rest.

Serve the audience you actually have.

A quick London origin, honest latency figures by region, and free migration with the old site left running.

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