A manufacturer's site has no basket. It has datasheets, part numbers and engineers filtering on tolerances, and each of those is a different hosting question.
Products described in numbers, documented in PDFs, and kept in the range for a decade. None of that behaves like an online shop.
Specification PDFs and CAD files are served through the edge cache with byte-range support, so a fifty-megabyte drawing downloads without occupying a PHP worker for the duration.
Voltage, tolerance, material and dimension filters run against indexed columns, so an engineer narrowing a range of four thousand parts gets an answer rather than a timeout.
Product URLs are treated as permanent and redirects are carried through rebuilds, because a part number gets cited in drawings and purchase orders long after a website changes.
Trade pricing, stock levels and ordering documents sit behind authentication and outside the cache, kept separate from the public catalogue everybody else sees.
Without a basket there is nothing per-visitor on a product page, so the public catalogue is entirely cacheable — which is the advantage most manufacturer sites never take.
The public catalogue and the distributor portal are the same site with entirely different requirements, and the failures come from treating them as one thing.
An engineer with a specification in hand filters before they read anything at all. That query is the site's real front door.
These are the settings that differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan. Each follows from a catalogue that is technical, document-heavy and long-lived.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Document delivery | Datasheets and drawings served from the edge with byte-range support | A large PDF sent through PHP holds a worker for the whole download, and engineers routinely pull several at once. |
| Attribute filters | Indexed columns for technical specifications | Filtering on a tolerance or a voltage stored as postmeta reads every product row for every single filter click. |
| Product URLs | Permanent, with redirects carried through redesigns | Part numbers appear in drawings and purchase orders that nobody is going to reprint because a website was rebuilt. |
| Distributor portal | Authenticated and excluded from cache, separate from the public catalogue | Trade pricing served from a cache shared with the public site is trade pricing that is no longer confidential. |
| Public catalogue cache | Long lifetimes, since nothing on a product page is per-visitor | There is no basket to invalidate, so anything short of an aggressive cache leaves the easiest available performance win unused. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, datasheets from the edge, and part numbers that keep resolving.