We’re happy to announce that HHVM is being added to our hosting server offerings. HHVM is an amazing technology originally build by Facebook that’s now been made open-source that uses a just-in-time compilation approach to achieve superior speed when handling PHP: the code that runs your WordPress website.
Why are we adopting HHVM?
In a single word, speed! HHVM is much faster than almost all other available technologies for running PHP. There are a lot of detailed performance tests comparing HHVM to these alternatives that show the results, but I don’t want to overwhelm you all with too much jargon. What you need to know is that once the rollout of HHVM comes through to your site you can expect to see a noticeable increase in site performance, especially areas like the WordPress admin, shopping carts and other dynamic content areas.
Are there any downsides?
The original Facebook team only built HHVM to run the main elements of code they needed to power Facebook, this meant that it was unable to run all the commands required to run a WordPress website. The community has been actively working to build on the work started by Facebook to complete HHVM to run all of PHPs functions. HHVM currently works with the top 20 frameworks, WordPress included. There is a chance that some 3rd-party plugins will run into incompatibilities with HHVM but that possibility is growing smaller every week. We will be testing each site as we swap over to HHVM to make sure there are no issues with your site during the change.
When will it roll out to my site?
We are still running some final tests, but you can expect that your site will be running on HHVM within the next 2 months.