Did you know Copyblogger Media has a WordPress hosting division? Many people don’t, because it’s been a bit under-the-radar.
The whole thing started with our frustration with web hosting in general. Specifically, the fact that a lot of “WordPress hosting” amounts to generic one-click installation of the CMS on a standardly-configured box — which simply doesn’t cut it for optimal performance and security.
So, last year we decided to manage our high-traffic network of content and product sites ourselves.
We did this by bringing into the family a team of people who themselves also ran high-traffic sites; people who had invested a ton of time learning how to make WordPress work really well at the server level, because, like us, their sites and livelihoods depended on it.
After enjoying the best hosting experience of my entire online career, it seemed smart to follow our usual modus operandi. That is, if we use it ourselves, then there’s a good chance others might want it as well.
With that, Synthesis was born. This time, however, we kept things limited to our existing customers and people we knew.
No hype. No big launch. No dancing unicorn videos.
Just a simple, unwavering focus on ensuring that Synthesis is the best WordPress hosting experience ever. Word of mouth, however, is a strange and wonderful thing.
Word Gets Around…
Pretty soon, we started getting pinged by people with serious performance and security requirements. Our response? No problem.
GeekBeat TV – The web show fronted by Cali Lewis gets hammered with traffic from fans, and we eliminated their sporadic downtime and reduced page load from 7.5 seconds to 1.4 seconds.
BlogWorld – The premier mega-conference of the blogging and new media space was crippled during its twice-yearly crunch time. We rescued them from their publicly-traded web host and gave them a quantum leap in performance.
Diario de Yucatan – Diario de Yucatan is one of Mexico’s most visited websites. They chose Synthesis for a flexible, secure, and scalable hosting platform after dealing with less-than-reliable performance.
Larry Brown Sports – One of the top independent publishers of sports-related content, LBS gets big traffic spikes from ESPN, FOX Sports, Sports Illustrated, CBS Sports, and NBC Sports.
Digital Photography School – After growing to 5,000,000 unique monthly visitors, DPS needed a highly scalable, secure architecture that could accommodate their existing external caching configuration. They said jump, we said how high.
Add to that Chris Pirillo’s massive site Lockergnome, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, and the company and client sites of online marketing agency BlueGlass, and we quickly got comfortable with the fact that we could handle any kind of site’s hosting needs … as long as they used WordPress.
But Synthesis is not just about sites with huge traffic. Any online publisher or business with a web presence needs to be very serious about the performance and security of the place people more often first experience your brand.
For example:
Pushing Social – Stanford Smith does everything right when it comes to creating great content, but every time I tweeted one of his articles, his site crashed. The last straw was when he got maliciously hacked. Stanford happily came over to Synthesis.
Convince and Convert – Jay Baer makes a living speaking, consulting, and doing a lot of traveling. That’s all made possible thanks to content marketing via his website, which he doesn’t want to worry about beyond hitting publish. Synthesis gave him fast, secure, and reliable peace of mind.
TomKat Studio – Kim Stoegbauer started a blog to share her craft projects, decorating, and party ideas, and then got crushed with big links from HGTV and Martha Stewart. Now, Synthesis allows Kim’s company to grow even larger when those magic link moments happen.
Your Best WordPress Hosting Experience Ever
If you’re looking for a better WordPress hosting experience, you’ll be in good company with these fine folks. We’re perfectly happy to allow Synthesis to grow by recommendations from clients and partners. The good will alone that comes from solving the frustration of a poor hosting experience is pretty fantastic.
And as always, we want you to be delighted. And we’re pretty sure you will be.
If not, don’t forget our hassle-free 30-day money-back guarantee. Simply contact support and we’ll promptly issue a refund.
Check out everything our Synthesis WordPress hosting has to offer.
Reader Comments (40)
Hi Brian
How come you don’t have an affiliate programme for Synthesis?
I would certainly promote it.
Hey Keith! Your promotion is, as always, most appreciated.
I’ll be sure to let you know when Synthesis’ affiliate program opens up to the public. Maybe even a little before. 😉
In the meantime, you should consider Synthesis for your own hosting! We’d love to have you…
Thanks Jess
Little ol me on Synthesis?
Give it time for my Studiopress affiliate earnings to get going and who knows…
Is an affiliate programme on the cards?
Absolutely, Keith. I’ll be sure to let you know when details are available.
I’ve been happy since switching to your hosting a few months ago and would love to be able to add a banner on my blog or write up another review to promote it.
My previous hosts throughout the years didn’t fully understand WordPress custom hosting. Synthesis got the hosting down perfect for us StudioPress folks. Also, thank you to the support team for answering my newbie questions a few months ago and transfering over my blog. It was painless and i didn’t have a heart attack while this was going on. lol
I’ll be waiting one day to add a affiliate link. 🙂
Hey Brian, will my Wishlist Member plugins work seamlessly with Synthesis?
I’ve had a nightmare run with 2 other hosting companies over the last 21 days.
Donovan, yes we support WishList at Synthesis and have actually done quite a bit of tweaking in our security software to accommodate for the way it goes about its business. If there is something that needs further tweaking, we are fully committed to support Wishlist.
As one of the early adopters, and developer of more than one of the sites listed above, I openly endorse the hosting service that Synthesis provides. This level of services has been sorely needed for a long time. Derick and team have put together an incredible service that has taken away the headaches involved with the hosting side of being a web developer.
Hosting is the most easily overlooked (until something goes wrong) yet fundamental aspect of your site and is probably the single biggest bang for your buck when building your business online.
Sorry if this sounds like an ad for Synthesis (no one paid me to say it), but as someone who builds sites, and often large and complex ones, I would encourage you to give Synthesis a try. You’re site will be faster, more secure and you’ll sleep better at night, at least I do!
Thanks Scott! You’ve definitely brought us a few from your customer base with diverse requirements required by their content publishing business models. It has been fun for the entire team over here to rise to the challenge. Look forward to working with you this week on yet another established site you are bringing us.
Guys – I’m really interested in this service. I’ve got a new site being finalised now so your hosting sounds ideal and very timely. One question – what happens if I opt for a plan (e.g. your starter plan) and I get a link from a high traffic site that exceeds the unique daily clicks for that package. Will the site cope before I upgrade the hosting?
Andy,
We don’t have a hard ceiling on those published numbers and can definitely flex in order to take the spike. It is part of our design. If it continues to happen, we’ll get the signals on the back end that let us know we need to work with you to upgrade plans. We definitely try to remove the hosting headache’s which includes having to worry about whether your site is up when you get that big tweet.
That’s great, thanks Derick.
Andy
Sounds great! I am looking for an expert to build a wordpress multisite on the genesis platform on synthesis. I need to be able to scale a specific design for clients… Over and over again.
Mike, multisite and Genesis are a great combo on Synthesis as we also built and maintain Pro Domain Mapping. We got a little info on the history of that here http://websynthesis.com/domain-mapping/ . We will take care of all the setup and configuration for multisite for you on our side though you will want to get a good designer/dev from the StudioPress community who has multisite experience.
Multisite is one of the most overlooked feature/benefits of WordPress.
How can I reach you?
The contact link at the bottom of the Synthesis site will get your inquiries into our team. http://websynthesis.com/contact/
Mike, Working on a couple fo sites like that right now. Let me know if I can help or you have any questions.
The bottom line here, based on my own experience as a full time WordPress consultant, is that managed hosting is the best solution for WordPress bloggers adding content on a daily basis.
You’ll see the difference over a one month period if you check out your average page loading speed across you entire site over this period. This is what Google looks at, NOT a single daily test on the home page.
I tried VPS for 6 months at different levels with different providers and it was more than twice as expensive as managed hosting and no where near the speed i’m getting from a managed host.
I also like the extra security managed hosting provides because there’s a huge amount of hacking and malicious injections targeted at WordPress users.
It’s very likely I’ll refer people your direction b/c my experience w/ Dreamhost and WordPress has been a nightmare lately.
Brad/Michael, thanks for the positive comments. We’re actually launching a blog at Synthesis very soon that will take topics across the board in online publishing industry and focus on the production/operational aspects of them. One of our first few posts that you will see there is one that tackles the topic of “Cost Of Ownership”. We’ve really focused hard at Synthesis to provide both designer/developers as well as content publishers a platform that minimizes the non-sense and helps them focus on their primary business. Stay tuned. . . .
I heard you guys are integrating with Sucuri… and maybe MaxCDN?
Greg, we do offer migration services that can include additional services from Sucuri. One service they provide is a comprehensive scan for back doors and security vulnerabilities on sites that have not been hacked. The second is a full dehacking and monitoring service at a discount from their stand alone pricing.
We are evaluating a high caliber CDN offering for sites that require it. More to come on that front.
Hey folks, I’d like to chime in as an extremely satisfied customer.
First, let me define “extremely satisfied”. For clarity, I am happier with the Synthesis hosting than I am with any other service I currently pay for – personally or professionally. Period.
A few months ago, GeekBeat.TV was hosted on its own server at Softlayer. It was a big server. 4 cores, 12GB RAM, Dual Raided hard drives. And the site more or less had it all to itself. Problem is, I had to manage it. And I’m no expert. I figured that if we threw enough iron at the back end, the site would hold up just fine. But there were other problems. Like OS security updates, application updates, caching – and then the occasional outage and ensuing fire drill.
I was so sick of trying to keep the site up, but our site is mission critical so I really had no option. None of the other hosting providers new jack squat about WordPress hosting, so I’d have been worse off with them than doing it myself.
Then the Synthesis team came along. I’ll tell you what makes a difference – they have sites that are just as heavily trafficked as ours! And they had already solved the scale and reliability problems for themselves. So I basically begged them to take on the challenge of GeekBeat.TV before they were even ready to launch a service, and being the nice guys they are (another important factor), they relieved me of my nightmares.
GeekBeat.TV has been running on Synthesis for months now without a hiccup. In fact, the day we made the switch the site was instantly about 500% faster. How that is possible when they put it on a server no bigger than the one it was on is a mystery. But I don’t care.
So, do what you will. But soon we’ll be migrating OneMansBlog.com and our other sites over, and I’ll get all that headache off my plate and then get back to what I love doing. Creating actual content.
Thanks to the whole Copyblogger team!
John P.
Thanks John. You remain a gentleman and a scholar. At least to me. 😉
I’ve been a happy customer for about 6 months now. Aside from the big improvement in my sites performance (big drop in response times, and far less spiky latency graph now) I’ve thrown all kinds of stuff at the Synthesis support team and they’ve been amazing. Great hosting, great support.
Great to hear that, Paul. I know you took a bit to decide to come over, so I’m glad we haven’t let you down.
Just thought I’d take this opportunity to say how truly fab Synthesis hosting has been for my small business. The customer support has been outstanding (special thanks to Cody for some terrific troubleshooting and follow-through). I signed up early on in your offering and have not regretted it for one moment. Thanks for all you’re doing!
Thank you Tammy! We’re happy to have your site with us.
Hosting which is specialized for Genesis Framework… seems very much interesting… checking further..
Do you know if they have any support for multiple IP addresses? Preferably multiple IP addresses on separate C-Blocks?
Looks promising, I’d like to know more. Thanks.
We have access to different class C blocks so there is some diversity across servers. However, we really do have to enforce a ‘business requirement’ rule on putting multiple IP addresses on a single server as they are not a commodity. Open a contact request at the synthesis main site and we can get into the details of your specific needs and provide you a more detailed response.
I like the idea of this a lot but some questions:
1) If I go for the Genesis hosted option do I get Genesis with it or do I need to buy and install myself, I’m no techie when it comes to WP.
2) I assume I need a Child Theme to get my site built on top of Genesis, is this an extra item I have to buy and install separately? For example, I like the Magazine theme for Genesis, do I need to buy that separately.
Apologies for the questions but it’s not very clear from the Plans and Pricing what the tick next to Genesis Framework really gets me.
Thanks , Dylan
Hi Dylan. Yes, you would get Genesis included and installed at no extra charge. The Magazine child theme would need be purchased, but since you will have Genesis, it’s only $24.95 instead of $79.95.
Look for the link beneath the the purchase box that says: Already own Genesis? Buy just the Magazine child theme.
Thanks Brian, that looks like great value.
So is the basic benefit of Synthesis that websites can adsorb larger traffic spikes and have more up time? Maybe I missed something in your post, but I didn’t see specifics as to why this is better than a regular host. I just see a lot of testimonials.
I am quite a novice when it comes to the technical side of websites and am just trying to understand.
My question is: Why or when would a website want to upgrade to your premium WordPress Hosting?
I would also like to add that I recently purchased the Genesis framework and have been very happy with it so far.
Brandon, the specifics, including technical details, are on the features page here.
Hey Brian,
When will the affliate program come out? I see big time bloggers on the list but what about us?
Thanks in advance.
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