Most clients didn’t need to do anything. If we manage your DNS, we handled the migration end to end. If we don’t, we coordinated the DNS cutover with you directly. Either way, pricing stays the same.
We’re sharing this because infrastructure changes can sound abstract until they affect something you use every day. This one shouldn’t be abstract. It should show up in faster admin screens, smoother editing, quicker publishing, and less friction in the parts of WordPress that can’t hide behind cache.
Why we made the move
DigitalOcean has been a solid provider for us, and this isn’t a post about pretending otherwise. The reason we moved is simpler: Vultr is now a better fit for the kind of WordPress hosting we run.
What matters to us isn’t abstract cloud flexibility so much as how a platform behaves under the work our clients do every day. That means PHP execution, database reads and writes, logged-in admin sessions, cache misses, WooCommerce tasks, backups, imports, and updates. None of that is especially glamorous, but it’s the part of hosting that determines whether a site feels quick and steady or slow and frustrating.
On that front, Vultr is the better fit for how we want to run the platform.
The benchmark gap isn’t small
We spent six months designing and testing this migration. Benchmarks aren’t the whole story, and they’re easy to misuse, but they are useful when the gap is large enough to explain a real decision. In our testing on comparable plans, it was.
CPU
CPU is where WordPress tends to feel its age fastest. A surprising amount of the admin experience still comes down to how quickly the server can process PHP on requests that aren’t cached.
| Metric | DigitalOcean | Vultr | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single core | 1043 | 2630 | about 2.5x |
| Multi core | 3566 | 10120 | about 2.8x |
For WordPress, CPU speed matters most in the places where caching can’t save you. Admin screens, logged-in sessions, uncached requests, page builder editing, plugin-heavy pages, and checkout flows all depend on how quickly PHP can get through real work. Multi-core headroom matters too once background tasks, multiple PHP workers, and concurrent users enter the picture, but single-core speed is still where a lot of day-to-day responsiveness begins.
Disk and storage
Storage is easier to ignore until it becomes the bottleneck. Databases, cache misses, autosaves, updates, and backups all spend time waiting on disk, which means slow storage has a habit of showing up as friction in places people notice.
| Metric | DigitalOcean | Vultr | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4k mixed I/O throughput | 141.76 MB/s | 1.19 GB/s | about 8.4x |
| 4k mixed I/O IOPS | 35.4k | 298.6k | about 8.4x |
That isn’t a marginal gain. The database benefits from it, object cache misses benefit from it, admin requests benefit from it, and so do autosaves, publishing, plugin updates, backups, imports, and exports. Disk performance doesn’t usually get the marketing spotlight, but it’s often where a lot of the day-to-day friction lives.
Where you’ll feel it
If most of your attention goes to the public side of a site, it’s fair to wonder how much of this shows up for anonymous visitors. The honest answer is: some of it will, but not all of it in obvious ways. Good caching still does a lot of work there.
Where this move should be most noticeable is inside WordPress itself and in the requests that can’t lean on cache. Backend, page builders, WooCommerce sessions, logged-in traffic, publishing workflows, and plugin-driven functionality all benefit when the server can respond faster and spend less time waiting on disk.
That’s the part of hosting that often gets overlooked in broad performance claims, and it’s the part we care about a lot. Frontend speed matters, of course. But managed WordPress hosting is also about how a site behaves when you’re working inside it, not only how it performs when everything is cached perfectly. We don’t want the platform to feel thin in those moments.
Why now
We did it now because we’d rather make this move deliberately than wait until we had to make it under pressure.
Infrastructure changes are never free. They take planning, testing, coordination, and a willingness to touch systems that are already working, so the reason needs to be strong enough to justify the effort. In our case, the performance gains are large enough that they do.
We had this migration in design and testing for six months. We benchmarked it, poked at it, and mapped out the operational side carefully. This isn’t our first hosting migration either. Three years ago, we moved our WordPress hosting from MassiveGrid to DigitalOcean. We learned a lot from that project, and the migration procedures we use today are much better because of it.
In other words, this wasn’t a late-night impulse. It was a planned infrastructure project with battle-tested process behind it.
How the rollout worked
The migration happened in phases.
If we managed DNS for your site, the move was largely transparent from your side. We handled the cutover ourselves and kept the window as quiet as possible.
If we didn’t manage DNS for your site, we contacted you directly to coordinate the required DNS changes. There was no heavy lifting involved on your side, but those sites needed a bit more scheduling because timing matters.
Our expected downtime was minimal. In most cases, the only visible interruption was a short window for SSL regeneration on the new server, usually around 5-10 minutes at most.
This was a platform improvement, not something reserved for a special tier or sold as an add-on, so it applied across our WordPress hosting with no price increase.
What changed for clients
The infrastructure provider changed, but the managed service around it did not. We still maintain the sites, monitor them, handle updates, run backups, and support everything the same way we always have.
There are also no pricing changes tied to this migration, and for most clients there were no action items. If we needed your help coordinating DNS because it was managed elsewhere, we reached out directly. Otherwise, we took care of it.
The point of Awwwsome’s managed hosting
We don’t think clients should have to become infrastructure project managers just because the platform underneath their site got better. Managed hosting should mean we handle the migration work, while you mostly notice the outcome: a site that feels quicker, behaves better under load, and sits on infrastructure we’re more confident in for the long term.
DigitalOcean helped us get here. But the right infrastructure choice isn’t really about loyalty to a vendor logo. It’s about whether the platform is still the best fit for the kind of service you want to run.
Right now, for our managed WordPress hosting, Vultr is the better fit. So we moved.