Web hosting for recruiters — The three things that break a job board

Recruitment sites get measured on the wrong page. A homepage full of stock photography scores well, while the page candidates actually use — search results filtered by sector, location and salary — is a database query no page cache can store, because every combination of filters is a different result.

Then there is the upload. People attach CVs with portfolios embedded, scanned certificates and slide decks. PHP has three separate ceilings involved: `upload_max_filesize`, `post_max_size` and `max_execution_time`. Leave them at defaults and a candidate on a phone gets a failed submission with no useful message, which reads to them as your agency losing their application.

And the alerts. A vacancy alert that lands in junk is worse than no alert at all, because you will believe it worked. All three are measurable in an afternoon, which is why this page is about tests rather than adjectives.

Raise `upload_max_filesize` and `post_max_size` together — a 12 MB CV needs headroom in both — and give `max_execution_time` enough room for a slow mobile connection to finish the transfer. Per-site PHP version and setting control is in the panel here, so this is a two-minute change rather than a support ticket, and you can verify it by uploading a deliberately large file yourself.

Then check what happens on failure. A form that returns a generic error, or worse a success page, loses the application silently. Confirm receipt on screen and by email, store the files somewhere organised, and remember that Sprint's 10 GB of NVMe fills faster with attachments than with pages: watch disk in the panel and step up to Turbo's 20 GB or Nitro's 200 GB before it bites.

Set an expiry date on every vacancy so filled roles come down without anyone remembering. This is a performance question as much as a credibility one: expired postings still get crawled, still occupy search result pages, and still make the filtered query sort over rows nobody wants. Archiving them keeps both the candidate experience and the query honest.

Take the measurements again after any structural change — a new filter, a plugin update, an import of a few thousand roles. Five curl runs against the same filter combination, at the same hour, medians compared. A board that was fast at two hundred vacancies is not automatically fast at twenty thousand, and the graph in cPanel will tell you which way it went.