Rochen interviewed about WordPress Hosting

Rochen Hosting CEO, Chris Adams, was able to talk with us for a bit about how WordPress and Rochen work together.

[rh] are Chris’ answers and [wphr] are the questions from WordPress Hosting Reviews.

[wphr] Would you consider Rochen to be a WordPress friendly company?

[rh]Yes, we host many WordPress powered blogs including our own blog itself which uses WordPress.

[wphr] What are the benefits of using Rochen over other hosting companies?

[rh]Many of the performance optimizations we apply to our environment for Joomla carry over for WordPress too. This includes PHP and MySQL tweaks as well as using the fastest possible storage. Rochen utilizes fast 15,000 RPM Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives while most shared hosts use higher capacity but slower SATA drives.

We also have our Rochen Vault managed backup platform which backs up customer sites twice per day with retention points over the past 30 days. This is included with all shared plans including our $8.95 per month Business Hosting Plan 1. Compared to many shared hosts who only backup customer sites once per week (and only keeping one restore point) and if too much data is uploaded they will cease backups completely. Particularly with a dynamic site with changing content like a WordPress blog regular and reliable backups are essential. This is one major issue with hosts advertising “unlimited disk space” as no such thing really exists.

Rochen are also in the process of developing a set of WordPress Utilities similar to our existing Joomla Utilities which will be integrated into our cPanel. This will make management of WordPress sites easier for our customers.

[wphr] Rochen appears to be well grounded in the Joomla community, do you see many people using WordPress on your servers?

[rh] We don’t maintain any precise statistics on what customers are using their Rochen account for but based on support tickets, posts within our customer forums and pre-sales questions we do have quite a lot of WordPress users. Not as many as Joomla though.

[wphr] What percentage of customers would you say are using WordPress?

[rh]We don’t maintain statistics on this.

[wphr] We know that Rochen has created some custom Joomla utilities, any plans to create a WordPress version of these tools?

[rh]Yes, we expect to roll these out by Q1 or Q2 of next year. We are in the process of making some major updates to our Joomla Utilities right now to assist customers, in particular web designers and developers, with managing staging / development sites. All of these functions will then be rolled into the WordPress Utilities.

[wphr] What server configuration steps has Rochen taken to ensure that WordPress works without technical issues?

[rh]We meet all of the minimum requirements that WordPress themselves list. In addition to this we then apply a customized configuration for PHP, MySQL and Apache to help with performance. Furthermore, Managed Virtual Server (MVS) and Managed Server customers can request we tune the environment for their specific site to drive even better performance.

[wphr] If a customer has trouble installing WordPress is tech support able to help?

[rh] We assist with any server-level technical matter but do not provide technical support or troubleshooting for third-party scripts such as WordPress. We have however partnered with Open Source Support Desk (www.opensourcesupportdesk.com) who provide such services to our customers.

[wphr] What is the process to migrate an existing WordPress site to Rochen?

[rh] Right now a manual migration would be required. However, once we release WordPress Utilities it will be a case of a couple of clicks as it is right now for any customer using Joomla. The “migration” tool is located within Joomla Utilities in the Rochen cPanel.

[wphr] Which Hosting plan is best for a WordPress blog?

[rh] This depends on the specific users’ needs in terms of concurrent users, monthly data transfer usage and storage requirements. Any potential customer would be advised to contact our sales team who can assist them prior to purchase. WordPress will run “out of the box” using any of our hosting plans including our Business Hosting Plan 1.

[wphr] What is one thing most people do not know about Rochen?

[rh] Although we are most well-known within the Joomla space we host many different scripts including WordPress, Drupal and Magento. Many users are also unaware that we have servers located in both the United States and United Kingdom.

[wphr] Anything you would like to add?

[rh]Starting in Q1 of 2012 we are going to have many new service rollouts particularly targeted towards the mid and higher level customer.

Rochen tries to be as transparent as possible with our pricing. For example, where we advertise $8.95 per month this is the actual monthly price without any lock-in. Compared to many other hosts who advertise a per month rate but it only applies if the customer pays for a full 3 years up front all in one go. Where we list a monthly rate it means just that.

We would like to thank Chris Adams of Rochen Hosting for taking the time to answer our questions.

Learn More About Rochen

• Read our full Rochen WordPress Hosting Review
• Visit Rochen to learn more
• Sign up at Rochen for WordPress Hosting

If you have any questions for Rochen feel free to leave them in the comments below and we will pass them along.

Thanks! — Steven Johnson