Professional high-traffic WooCommerce hosting

Why Headwall Hosting is Different

We’re not a multi-national corporation. We are an independent provider of professional WordPress & WooCommerce hosting.

Unlike large, impersonal providers, we have a local presence in Reading, UK. All our web servers are located in London, ensuring minimal latency for your UK-based customers and a fast connection to European networks.

Proactive Security and Threat Management

Our primary added value is the pro-active nature of what we do. We’re always monitoring server log files and resource usage, which is where things like website attacks manifest themselves. We constantly adapt our back-end security measures to stay ahead of malicious actors.

Every site we host includes built-in brute-force login protection, so you don’t need to install plugins like Wordfence. While you’re free to use it, we’ve found that it adds unnecessary overhead and can slow down your site. Our integrated solution is designed to be highly effective without compromising on performance.

Automatic backups & updates

All sites (live & staging) come with 21 consecutive full-site backups. These are encrypted and pushed to an off-site server every night. WordPress core, plugins, and themes are updated automatically. Problematic updates are automatically rolled-back and then dealt with. This usually involves us reaching out to the developer of the faulty plugin so they can resolve & test a new update.

You can hold-back individual plugins from being updated, which can be useful if you’re working through issues or new features with a plugin developer.

What about a CDN?

We don’t include a CDN as part of our package. If your customer base is mostly UK/Europe then you probably don’t need a CDN, unless your site makes heavy use of video (e.g. front page hero) or you have lots of high-resolution product images.

You can use Cloudflare with our hosting, although we tend to recommend against it because it bypasses some of our security measures. Cloudlfare is great at protecting really big sites against really big attacks, but for most sites we find it lets through too many modern threats. You need to constantly tweak your Cloudflare WAF rules to stay on top of attacks. Our firewall and security tools have been specifically set up to work well with WordPress & WooCommerce sites.

For clients who need a CDN to serve media, particularly for non-European visitors, we highly recommend BunnyNet. We have no affiliation with them, but we have extensive experience in fine-tuning WordPress & WooCommerce to work seamlessly with their service, ensuring optimal performance for your global audience.