Why Websites on Planetary Cloud Fly

Fraz Wahlah / Chief Rocketeer

Our users know Rocket Domains is always on the cutting edge of tech to give websites lightning fast speeds, best-in-class security, and 99.99% uptime with our powerful WordPress hosting infrastructure called Planetary Cloud. There are many exciting features that make the Planetary Cloud one of the fastest and most reliable web hosting platforms for WordPress sites. Let’s walk you through some key features one by one.

1. Built on Google Cloud

Rocket Domains’ Planetary Cloud is built on Google Cloud which leads the cloud industry with its unparalleled performance, speed and security. It’s the same cloud infrastructure that Google itself uses to deliver its own products like Google Search, Gmail, Youtube, Workspace, Drive, etc. That should give you an idea of the kinds of speed, performance and reliability you can get with the Planetary Cloud.

What’s more, as the name suggests, Planetary Cloud is completely Cloud based which means you’re looking at zero downtime. How? Well, one of the hallmarks of true cloud hosting is that your website files are stored on not one but multiple cloud servers. In case a server goes down, your site will still continue to function as it’ll still be served from other cloud server locations.

Planetary Cloud is truly global in that it has data centers in four continents (Europe, Americas, Asia, Australia) across the planet:

2. Planetary DNS for Faster, Safer & Always-Available Websites

Both domain names and web hosting infrastructure on Rocket Domains are powered by our Planetary DNS which is geographically dispersed around the planet thanks to the state of the art underlying Anycast network routing technology. This means your domains and websites on Rocket Domains benefit from faster resolution and website loading times.

Let me give you an example of how it works. You see, when visitors enter your domain in their browsers to access your website, the browser makes a DNS lookup to see which IP the domain points to, and then connects the visitor with the server with that IP. That is how visitors are able to access your website from a browser. The typical, or shall we call it “mediocre”, DNS setup that most domain registrars and hosting companies offer takes longer to connect visitors with your website due to the large geographic or even continental distances between the visitor and the server resolving your domain.

With our Planetary DNS, which works on 5 geographical locations across the planet and multiple instances, the domain resolving is handled by the node closest to the visitor which in turn eliminates networking delays and boosts website loading speeds.

You will be surprised to know this but your domain name and hosting provider, including those with funny words like “Daddy” in their names, give you that slow mediocre DNS, and charge you at least $35.88 per year for premium DNS. This means your domains and websites are using an outdated DNS set up which is slow as heck and may even be putting your business at risk. Rocket Domains users, however, get our premium Planetary DNS infrastructure for free with both domain name and web hosting services.

You may also not know how your legacy DNS setup, that you may have with your other domain registrar or hosting provider, is putting your website or business at risk. Read on to learn how.

Unlike your current legacy DNS setup, our Planetary DNS is based on not one but many geographically dispersed machines across the planet making it super resilient against attacks and downtime. For instance, if one of the DNS servers goes down, the DNS requests will still be managed and resolved by another working node that is closest to your visitors. Additionally, Planetary DNS protects you like a shield against targeted Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This means if a malicious actor on the Internet floods you with unwanted traffic, it will be dispersed among multiple DNS machines making it harder for such attackers to take your website down.

The Planetary DNS also offer 100% uptime keeping your website and applications always online. For example, if your website is hosted on the Planetary Cloud, and for email services your domain’s MX records are pointed to Gmail, the Planetary DNS will ensure your mail continues to function in the rare instance your web servers encounter a problem.

To sum it up, Planetary DNS ensures no Internet routing issues can take down your primary DNS, make your website unavailable and leave your visitors high and dry. By simply keeping your domain and/or website with Rocket Domains will eliminate “website not found” errors, protect you from hackers redirecting your visitors to a fake site, and keep your website always-online. Additionally, with DNSSEC you can protect your domain from cache poison attacks and spoofing.

3. NVMe SSDs

Rocket Domains severs use NVMe SSDs to store your website’s content. NVMe, short for Non-Volatile Memory Express, is a new protocol that is used to access high-speed storage devices like SSDs. It is faster than the SATA SSD that other hosting providers use.

SSD storage is about 10 times faster than the good old HDD storage which are susceptible to mechanical failure risks due to a lot of moving parts. What’s more SSDs are energy efficient too. With no moving parts or a mechanical motor, SSDs consume much less power. When no data is being written or accessed, an SSD consumes virtually zero power.

So, with Rocket Domains NVM E SSDs cloud storage rest assured your website loads faster with minimum possible risk of downtime, data loss or storage failure.

4. Super Fast NGNIX Reverse Proxy

Rocket Domains uses a custom configuration of Linux container with Apache as Web Server and NGNIX as reverse proxy called NGNIX Content Delivery. This unique set up does wonders for your website speed as your website content is directly served by NGNIX instead of Apache. This translates to less load on the Web Server and faster website response times for returning visitors.

5. HTTP/3 Protocol + Memcached

Rocket Domains web hosting infrastructure supports the latest and fastest version of the “Hypertext Transfer Protocol” called HTTP/3. HTTP protocols are used to exchange information on the World Wide Web. HTTP/3 runs over QUIC instead of TCP/IP. QUIC, on the other hand, is a secure UDP-based stream protocol that forms the basis of HTTP/3. Furthermore, all websites on Rocket Domains Planetary Cloud have Memcached and PHP optimization via OPCache to deliver the best possible site speed.

6. Brotli Compression

The state of the art Brotli compression is deployed by default on all websites on Rocket Domains’ Planetary Cloud giving websites up to 15-20% speed boost.

Brotli is a next generation compression algorithm built by Google to replace the good old GZIP. Brotli compresses the HTML output and resources of your website on the fly, and transmits it over the Internet to the browser which then decompresses the content before rendering it before visitor’s eyes. This process massively decreases the size of content transmitted from the web server to the visitor, giving websites running Brotli a massive speed and bandwidth advantage.

In other words, Brotli compresses your website into a much smaller data chunk, making its transfer much faster. To give you an example of how Brotli offers superior compression than GZIP, JavaScript files compressed with Brotli are about 15% smaller than the ones compressed with GZIP while HTML files are about 20% and CSS files about 16% smaller.

7. WordPress Speed, Caching & Optimisation Plugins

Rocket Domains also provides a nifty plugin for WordPress sites with powerful features like NGNIX Content Delivery Cache; HTML, CSS & JS Code Minification & Optimization; Static & Dynamic Caching, Image compression & WebP image convertor; Google Fonts Optimization; WordPress Core Optimization; Browser Caching; DNS Prefetch; Database Optimization & auto maintenance; and Lazy load media among many other useful tools to make your WordPress site load faster. Although, using the plugin is easy, you can ask Rocket Domains’ Astronomical Support to configure the plugin to provide best possible optimization for your site.

8. Latest PHP

On Rocket Domains’ Planetary Cloud you can use the latest, greatest and fastest PHP versions like PHP 8+. What’s more PHP on Planetary Cloud is especially tweaked to optimally work with our Google Cloud hosting infrastructure giving you even better speed and performance. That is one more advantage that no other host will offer.

9. CloudFlare CDN & Planetary CDN

Rocket Domains users have access to two world-class Content Delivery Network (CDN) options as follows: (i) CloudFlare; and (ii) Rocket Domains’ own Planetary CDN.

Both CloudFlare CDN and Planetary CDN offer tremendous speed advantages and can be deployed with one click. To manage CDN, you don’t have to go anywhere else as it’s configurable from inside the Rocket Domains Dashboard.

As far as pricing is concerned, CloudFlare CDN is included for free with Planetary Cloud, while Planetary CDN is available as an add on. CloudFlare also includes a premium feature called RailGun for free.

Now let me reveal some exciting bits about Rocket Domains’ very own Planetary CDN:

(a) Having both your WordPress site and CDN with Rocket Domains makes communication between them faster resulting in lightning fast speeds with zero latency. That is something third party CDNs cannot provide.

(b) To deploy Planetary CDN no configurations or Name Server and DNS changes are needed. All it takes is the use of our Name Servers and a click of a button.

(c) Planetary CDN supports both static & dynamic caching.

(d) Planetary CDN’s Always Online feature keeps your site working even if your original site is down for some reason.

(e) Planetary CDN’s Dev Mode allows you to see website changes live without having to switch CDN caching off.

(f) The following carefully chosen data center locations across the world power the planetary CDN network:

10. Great Pricing, Free Setup & Migration, Intuitive Dashboard & Tools + Astronomical Support

Rocket Domains Planetary Cloud starts from just $12 per month. There are a wide range of packages and specs to choose from. Rocket Starter is for a single WordPress site, while Rocket Booster, Rocketeer and Rocket Cloud packages are for those who need to deploy more websites with more space, custom memory and processing power.

Rocket Domains offers free migration for all your websites, and if you want to do it yourself you will be given a free migration plugin too. If you don’t have a site to migrate and are starting afresh, Rocket Domains will help you set one up and optimise it for you.

To manage your Planetary Cloud, you get an intuitive dashboard which places the planet’s most powerful website and cloud hosting tools in your hands. For example, you can install, access, or manage WordPress, SSL, Staging, Backup/Restore, PHP versions, and more with a single click.

Did I mention that you have both on demand and daily backups which are stored offsite in a different geographic region? So no more losing your site data or emails if your data center gets destroyed in an Armageddon.

Another great advantage of Rocket Domains’ Planetary Cloud is the ability to deploy Emails with powerful spam protection on the same Google Cloud. Alternatively, you can opt for Email on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 with all the business apps you love.

Rocket Domains’ support is called “Astronomical Support” for a reason as we will go out of the way to guide and help you when you open a ticket from your Mission Control Dashboard.

We know it takes more than having a great performing website to succeed in business. It’s why each Rocket Domains’ Planetary Cloud user gets a premium SEO plugin so you can apply powerful SEO tools on your site to optimise it for better ranking for your content and attract more visitors. This is in addition to the Caching/Speed Optimization plugin you’ll receive.

The free goodies keep coming as you also get yet another plugin compatible with Planetary Cloud which will help you improve security and access controls for your WordPress site with ease. You’ll also get some premium local listings for your business giving your business the much needed exposure in different regions. These goodies alone are worth hundreds of dollars per year but you get them for free with your Planetary Cloud.

Now you know what makes WordPress sites, on Rocket Domains, so lightning quick and how our unique domain & WordPress cloud tech infrastructure blow the competition out of water.

I hope I have made a compelling case for why Rocket Domains’ Planetary Cloud should be your go-to WordPress hosting platform. You can sign up for the Planetary Cloud here, and for the Planetary CDN here. You can also register or transfer your domain and get Planetary DNS free too.

Remember if you’re stuck, our Ground Control Astronomical Support is just a ticket away.

Happy Rocketeering!

Fraz Wahlah
Chief Rocketeer at Rocket Domains

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