Performance guide · London
London hosting, measured rather than promised
You already suspect the site is slower than it should be. This page names the number that proves it, shows where those milliseconds go, and says which ones you can actually move.
The short answer
Measure time to first byte first, because in London that is the number you can change: the round trip from a UK connection to our London datacentre runs about 5-15 ms, so anything past a couple of hundred milliseconds is your application thinking, not the distance.
HostingFast runs NVMe storage behind a LiteSpeed cache in London, with free SSL, free migration and engineers on shift at every hour. A cache hit leaves the server without ever loading PHP; the real work is making sure your pages are in that cache.
By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 12 August 2026
99.9%
Uptime target, credited
24/7
Engineers on shift
Free
SSL, renewed for you
NVMe
Storage on every tier
Old Street fintech, EC3 insurance, Soho post-production and thirty-two boroughs of small firms — and nearly all of them get judged on a phone with one bar of signal somewhere under the Northern line. That is the connection your desktop Lighthouse run never sees.
So this page is arranged the way you would actually work: find the number, break it into its parts, change one thing, measure again. The domain gets a section of its own, because DNS sits in the request path and is routinely forgotten.
Where a London page's milliseconds actually go
Run curl against your own domain from a London connection with -w '%{time_namelookup} %{time_connect} %{time_appconnect} %{time_starttransfer}' and read the gaps rather than the total. Name lookup is DNS. Connect minus namelookup is the TCP handshake. Appconnect is TLS. Everything after that is the only part your host and your code control.
For a UK visitor the round trip to London is roughly 5-15 ms, so DNS, TCP and TLS together account for a few tens of milliseconds at most. Whatever remains is PHP execution, database queries, and whether the response came out of the cache or was assembled from scratch.
The half of the site LiteSpeed will never cache
Cached HTML is handed over without loading WordPress at all, and on a properly configured site that covers nearly every page a logged-out visitor opens. Confirm it by reading the x-litespeed-cache response header on the document request — a hit means your code was never involved.
The exceptions bite harder in London than most places, because so much of the local economy ships logged-in software. Dashboards, account screens and checkout are uncacheable by design and pay for a database round trip every time. Fix those with indexes, fewer queries and object caching, not with a second caching plugin.
Choosing between .co.uk and .london without paying for it in DNS
.co.uk reads as British before anyone finishes the address bar. .london earns its place when the city is the whole proposition — clinics, studios and trades working a fixed set of postcodes wear it well. Register either on the same account as the hosting and the records are aimed correctly from the start.
The detail people miss is TTL. A cold resolver walks the delegation chain before a single byte of your page is requested, so keep A and CNAME TTLs sensible and do not leave them at sixty seconds forever after a migration. Check the chain with dig +trace, then put the values back.
Proving it moved, not just that it feels faster
One Lighthouse run is a sample of one, taken on a laptop that was also doing something else. Take three, keep the median, and treat lab figures as a diagnostic rather than a verdict.
The verdict comes from the field. Search Console's Core Web Vitals report reads a 28-day rolling window of real visits, so a change shipped on Monday needs time to accumulate before it shows. The bar it grades you against is LCP at or under 2.5 seconds and INP at or under 200 ms for the 75th percentile of your visitors.
What the platform underneath is doing
Every account sits on NVMe storage with LiteSpeed in front of it in a London datacentre, and the accounts-per-server count is kept deliberately low so a noisy neighbour is not your performance problem. SSL is free and renews itself; migration from your current host is done for you.
Backups run daily and restore from the panel — one file, one database or the lot — so an experiment that goes wrong costs minutes instead of an evening.
- .co.uk or .london on the same account as the hosting
- LiteSpeed caching at server level, not another plugin
- SSH, Git and Composer without raising a ticket
- First reply inside two hours, inside one when a site is down
Why HostingFast
Standard on every plan
Caching compiled into the server
LiteSpeed sits in the web server rather than in PHP, so a cache hit never loads WordPress. The x-litespeed-cache header tells you which requests are getting that treatment.
NVMe from the entry tier up
Storage is NVMe on every plan, which is where a query-heavy page gets its read latency back. No quietly slower drives on the cheaper tiers.
A London origin
The datacentre is in London, so a UK audience is 5-15 ms away and your uncacheable requests are not crossing an ocean before they start thinking.
Uptime with a credit attached
The 99.9% target is monitored, and a month that misses it earns a pro-rated credit back on the account. Point your own external check at an uncacheable URL and grade the platform on your data rather than ours.
The tooling you already use
SSH, Git and Composer on the account, WP-CLI for anything scripted, and WordPress Toolkit for the jobs that are genuinely faster with a click.
Migration you can measure
Our engineers move the site free and leave the old one serving, so you can compare time to first byte on both before DNS changes hands.
Quick Start
From order to online
- 1
Take the baseline
Record TTFB, LCP and the cache header on your three busiest URLs before you change a thing. Without that, any improvement is an anecdote.
- 2
Register or transfer the name
Take .co.uk or .london on the same account as the hosting, or transfer in the name you already run, so the records are aimed correctly from the start rather than edited later at a second provider. Year one is free on qualifying annual plans.
- 3
Move the site, keep the old one live
Free migration takes about a day and your current host keeps serving throughout, which leaves you two identical sites to measure against each other.
- 4
Flip DNS, then re-measure
Change delegation, let the resolvers catch up, then repeat the exact same commands. Keep the output — it is the only proof anything got better.
Built In
Loaded onto every plan
- x-litespeed-cache returning a hit on logged-out pages
- TTFB captured from a London connection before and after every change
- Images served as WebP, with width and height set in the markup
- PHP version chosen per site in cPanel rather than left on an old default
- Daily backups, restored from the panel without opening a ticket
- SSH, Git and Composer available on the account
- Free SSL that renews itself before it can lapse
- Free migration run by our engineers, with the old site left serving
- Plan changes applied in place — no migration when you move up a tier
- 99.9% uptime target, monitored, with a pro-rated credit if a month misses
Frequently Asked
What people ask us most often
What TTFB should I be aiming for from a London connection?
Google's field threshold treats 800 ms or less as good, but that is a floor rather than a target. London to a London origin, a cached page should leave in the low tens of milliseconds and an uncached WordPress page in a couple of hundred. Seconds means the cache is missing and the cause is in your application, not the network.
How do I tell whether a page came out of the cache?
Read the response headers on the document request itself, not on an asset. LiteSpeed sets x-litespeed-cache, and a hit means the request never reached PHP. curl -I is the quickest way; the Network panel in Chrome DevTools shows the same thing with the timings beside it.
The front end is quick but the dashboard crawls. Why?
Because the dashboard is logged-in traffic and cannot be cached, so every screen runs the full PHP and database path. It is usually plugin queries or a bloated autoloaded options row rather than the server. Profile before you buy capacity — on the top shared tier, PHP X-Ray on CloudLinux Pro will point straight at the slow call.
Does a London origin help visitors who are not in London?
For a UK audience, decisively: 5-15 ms is as close as it gets. Further out the round trip grows and a CDN handles cached HTML, images, CSS, JavaScript and fonts from an edge near the visitor. What a CDN cannot help with is anything uncacheable — checkout, account screens and database queries still run the full distance to the origin.
Can I test a change without gambling the live site?
Clone to staging, change it there, measure with the same commands you used on production, then push it live. WordPress plans allow up to ten staging copies, which is enough to keep one per experiment rather than reusing a single scratch environment.
Keep reading
Hosting in the United Kingdom
Rates in GBP, which domain endings we can register there, and how the tax works out.
Web Hosting in Cambridge
Deep-tech spin-outs, documentation sites and an audience that is often not in Britain.
Web Hosting in Barcelona
Southern European round trips, .es or .cat, and the point where caching stops rescuing you.
Registering a Domain Name
Registering a name, and the DNS records you will need the moment it resolves.
Web Hosting
cPanel on NVMe behind LiteSpeed — the origin your TTFB measurements come out of.
Business Hosting
SSH, Node.js, Python and PostgreSQL on the tier developers actually ask for.
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.
Measure it, then move it.
NVMe and LiteSpeed out of London, SSL and migration included, engineers answering at any hour — at a rate that renews unchanged.
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