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How I improved my WordPress GTmetrix grade

April 28, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge 15 Comments

I’ve managed to improve my GTmetrix page speed and Ylow grades from the mid 70’s to 98% for Page Speed and 97% for YSlow with a page load time of only 1.18 seconds. Here’s a link to the report (if the link is dead feel free to re-run the test). In this post I’m going to outline my configuration so that anyone interested in replicating my results can save themselves some effort.

Here’s a screen shot of my grade after I’ve implemented the solutions that I’m about to outline in this post. If you’re still in doubt feel free to run the test yourself but be sure to use the secure URL at https://odinsql.com to avoid any redirection delay.

How I improved my GTmetrix page speed and yslow scores.

OdinSQL.com GTmetrix Page Speed and YSlow grades

Does GTMetrics even matter?

If you’re wondering what value a high Page Speed and YSlow grade have, I can attest that the quicker page loads have dramatically improved the volume of traffic that Google and the other search engines are now sending my way which has resulted in more revenue. In short this article has huge Search Engine Optimization (SEO) implications as well as providing a better overall experience to the impatient hordes accessing your site.

So let’s get into how I’ve managed to pull off such a fantastic score and what you can do to duplicate my results.

Hosting

In order to implement the methods that I’m about to outline you’re going to need fast, low latency hosting. If you’re using crappy shared hosting you’re going to need to replace it with at least a VPS with sold state drives (SSD). Two companies that fit the bill which I would recommend are RamNode and Vultr. RamNode is faster of the two but is slightly more expensive. If managing a VPS isn’t something you’re capable of, I would recommend checking out CloudWays. CloudWays adds server management on top of DigitalOcean, Amazon or Google’s “cloud”. You won’t be able to implement the image compression method that I outline with CloudWays but they do have great caching built into their software stack. If you have the traffic that would justify the expense you may even want to go all out and lease a dedicated server. Choopa.com which is the parent company of Vultr offers both managed and self managed dedicated servers. For the vast majority of WordPress sites a dedicated server would be a completely unnecessary expense.

Web Server

The combination of Nginx and PHP-FPM is significantly faster and with lower memory requirements than Apache. (Yes, I know that you can configure PHP-FPM to work with Apache) Nginx is fast and works spectacularly under heavy load. If you want to greatly improve your sites performance while using the same hardware Nginx is going to be an essential component to making that happen. I’ve previously written about how I was able to configure a $10 per month virtual server to serve up 15,000 page views per minute using Nginx.

Theme

I’ve spent countless hours trying to find a free theme that’s both good looking, functional and isn’t full of unnecessary fonts, JavaScript and CSS includes without much success. Every one of the many free themes that I’ve implemented had fairly major flaws. I’m not saying that there aren’t any good free themes I’m just saying that I wasn’t able to find any that met my needs. I had read many positive reviews regarding Genesis framework and finally decided to pay the $100 for the framework and the Metro Pro theme from StudioPress. I could have probably spent the better part of a week coding my own custom theme but I value several days of my time more than the $100 that I invested in this theme. As it is I spent the better part of two days just configuring Metro Pro. I’ve seen about a 30% increase in page views since making the switch and if even half of that is due to the theme it will pay for itself within a couple of weeks.

Combine and Minify

Having too many external files that need to be downloaded can slow down the rendering of you site greatly. I have several plugins that I use and It seems like every plugin has it’s own css and js include. Without combining and minify-ing I had around 15 CSS and JS files each. Ideally WordPpress would come up with a better solution that having every plugin add it’s own css and js include so that this whole combining and minify process wouldn’t even be necessary.

I spend the better part of a Sunday afternoon installing, testing, uninstalling and retesting a multitude of wordpress plugins that are supposed to combine and minify my css and js including “Better WordPress Minify”, “WP Super Minify”, “W3 Total Cache”, “Combine CSS”, “Combine JS”, “WP Optimize By xTraffic”, “Autoptimize” and “Speed Booster Pack”. Each plugin had dozens of positive reviews. Unfortunately the majority of them didn’t work nearly as well as was claimed.  A couple performed well but the plugin that managed to improve my score the most and that I’m actually using and recommend was “Speed Booster Pack” it’s free and it actually works.

Image Compression

Images that are needlessly large in file size can take a really long time to download. Back in the mid 1990’s I used to have to painstakingly tweak image export settings for each any every image. Fortunately things are a lot simpler now. You can just upload your images and let a WordPress plugin losslessly compress your images without any manual intervention.

Up until a couple of weeks ago I had been using the SmooshIt plugin which would upload your images to a yahoo server which would then optimize and resize them before putting them in into your media library. Unfortunately yahoo has plans to discontinue this service and the plugin was nagging me about paying for a pro version, for some number of dollars that I can’t remember but wasn’t willing to spend per year. I opted to giving optimizing the images on my own server a try and found the CW Image Optimizer plugin. CW Image Optimizer requires that LittleUtils is installed on the server which is what is doing the actual image optimization on your own server instead of shipping them off some place else. Installing LittleUtils can be a bit of a pain it the but to install correctly. I’m happy with the results but I wish that there was a simpler installation method.

Once LittleUtils was installed I re optimized all of my images by using the regenerate thumbnails plugin.

Caching

Don’t make your server work harder than necessary. If your content doesn’t change every few seconds you should be implementing some form of caching. When a client makes a request to your site instead of looking up the data in the database or compiling your PHP it’s much, much faster to save a copy from when someone else made the same request to a file or in memory and server that version instead. Properly implementing a caching strategy can literally (not figuratively) improve your servers performance by 1000 times or more. My current caching configuration includes w3 Total Cache configured to use Memcached for caching queries and WordPress objects, OPCache configured in PHP-FPM and an Nginx proxy cache configured to cache pages to disk.

I’m only using a $10 VPS which doesn’t give me much memory to work with. If I had at least 2GB of ram I would configure Varnish to use memcached for the page cache.

Content Distribution Network (CDN)

For those of you not in the know, a content distribution network basically copies your static content such as your images, js, css, html and cached pages onto their servers that are closer to the people that are visiting your site than your own server and serves the copies instead of downloading the content from your server each time it’s requested. This results in your server being put under less load and your visitors downloading your content more quickly. Faster page loads equal happy users and happy users spend more time on your site resulting in you making more money. If for some reason you’re still not using a CDN head over to CloudFlare.com and sign up for a free account.
I’m actually using the $20 a month pro plan now but the free plan should have a positive impact for anyone that’s not currently using a CDN.

 

That’s it for this post. I hope that some one out there found some of this information at least mildly useful. If you think that I’ve left something out or would like me to go into more detail please leave a comment or send me a message via my contact form and let me know. If you would like to stay update regarding my blog posts please join my newsletter by entering your name and email address in the big black box on the right hand navigation menu.

Filed Under: Hosting, wordpress Tagged With: Wordpress

A Vultr walk-through

April 19, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge 8 Comments

I’ve mentioned Vultr in several of my previous blog posts. I’ve covered how Vultr significantly outperforms their main competitor DigitalOcean in both price and performance in the low cost solid state drive (SSD) virtual private server (VPS) hosting market. Today I thought that I would do a walk-through of Vultr via a series of annotated screenshots. Along the way I hope to show you why I’ve moved away from DigitalOcean for all of my new development servers and why Vultr is currently one of my favorite VPS hosting option.

 

Registration

So let’s get started with the homepage where creating a new account is as simple as entering our email address and password form the home page.

VULTR new user registration

New user registration

 Billing

After clicking on the “deploy now” button you’ll need to enter your payment details. Services are billed based on an hourly rate up to a maximum monthly rate. with servers starting at $5.00 a month or $0.007 (7/10 of a penny) per hour for a VPS with 1 CPU 768MB memory 15GB storage 1000 GB of monthly transfer. The minimum deposit is $5 but it also comes with a $5 bonus credit that it automatically added to your account.

Vultr enter billing information credit card.

Enter credit card billing information.

Payment can be made via credit card, (visa, MasterCard, AMEX or Discover) PayPal or even bit coin.

Vultr PayPal payment option

PayPal payment option

Vultr bitcoun payment option

Bitcoin payment option

Deploy

After entering your preferred payment option you can now get started deploying your first virtual server.

There’s a lot to talk about on this next screenshot.

Server type

First off there are three different server types to choose from :

Performance – Have from 1 to 4 CPU, SSD storage and are available at data centers located around the world.

Storage – Have either 1 or 2 CPU large SATA disks and are available in New Jersey or Los Angles data centers.

Multi-Core – Have between 8 and 20 CPU SSD storage and are only available in the New Jersey data center.

Location

Vultr has a total of 14 different data centers located around the world in the following cities and countries

  • Chicago, Illinois, USA
  • New Jersey, USA
  • Dallas, Texas, USA
  • Los Angeles, California, USA
  • Miami, Florida, USA
  • Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  • Seattle, Washington, USA
  • Silicon Valley, California, USA
  • Sydney, Australia
  • Tokyo, Japan
  • Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • London, England, UK
  • Paris, France
  • Frankfurt, Germany

Operating System

They have many different OS choices, including verities of Linux, BSD and Windows available and unlike the vast majority of other VPS hosts Vultr also allows for the installation of custom ISO’s. They also have a few applications which can be installed when deploying a new server. I’ll cover the applications latter on.

By default the following OS options are available.

  • CentOS 5
  • CentOS 6
  • CentOS 7
  • Ubuntu 14.04
  • Ubuntu 12.04
  • Ubuntu 14.10
  • Ubuntu 15.04 (added on April 23rd 2015)
  • Debian 7
  • FreeBSD 10
  • CoreOS Stable
  • Windows 2012 R2 (at additional cost)

Optional Features

The following optional features are also available IPV6, Private Network and Auto Backup at an additional 20% above the price of the VPS. Auto backup isn’t available on the storage series of VPS.

Vultr deploy performance VPS options

Deploy performance VPS options

In the next image we have the storage series VPS options.

Vultr VPS deploy storage series

VPS deploy storage series

At the time I took the next screen shot the Multi-Core series was sold out.

Vultr VPS deploy multi-core series

VPS deploy multi-core series

The 32 bit OS options

Vultr 32bit OS options

32bit OS options

Vultr Applications

  • LEMP on CentOS 6
  • WordPress on CentOS 6
  • Minecraft on CentOS 6
  • webmin on centOS 6
  • ownCloud on CentOS 6
  • OpenVPS on CentOS 6
  • cPanel on CentOS 6 ($15 additional monthly)
Vultr deploy applications

Deploy applications

In the next image we show the custom OS installation options.

Vultr deploy custom

Deploy custom

Deploy from snapshot

You can also deploy a new VPS from a snapshot of one of your current VPS. If I had taken any snapshots they would have been listed here.

Vultr deploy from snapshot

Deploy from snapshot

 

Startup scripts

when deploying you can optionally set up a start up script which will run the immediately after install.

 

Vultr manage Statup scripts

Manage Statup scripts

Next we have the screen for adding a new start-up script

Vultr add startup script

Add startup script

SSH

An SSH key can be assigned at the time of deployment which, if present will be required to log into the server.

Vultr SSH Keys

Manage SSH Keys

Manage your servers

vultr installing new vps

Installing new VPS

After the new VPS is finished installing you will be given the option to manage your new server.

Vultr manage new server

Manage new server

Server Information

After clicking on manage you will see your information about your server including it’s location, the type of OS that has been installed, it’s label and any tags that have been assigned to it. For example you could create a group of server that you tag as web servers or database servers. You will also see any IP addresses IPV4 or IPV6 address that have been assigned to your server.

Server Actions

From this interface you can open a console, stop, start, restart, reinstall, change the os, destroy and delete your VPS, manage the root password, view usage graphs, manage DNS, add additional IPV4 or IPV6 addresses, take snapshots or backup your VPS.

Vultr server actions

Server actions

Although I personally prefer to SSH into my servers, everything can be managed directly from the Vultr VPS management interface. Clicking on the console button will open a noVNC window directly to your VPS.

Vultr noVNC VPS management console

noVNC VPS management console

Server tags can be useful if you have many VPS and you would like to divide them into groups.

Update server tag

Update server tag

Stop your VPS

stop vps

stop vps

Restart VPS

Restart VPS

Restart VPS

Reinstall your VPS

Reinstall your VPS

Reinstall your VPS

Delete and destroy your VPS

 Delete and destroy your VPS

Delete and destroy your VPS

You can change the OS after deployment but it will delete all of your existing data.

Change OS

Change OS

This next snapshot shows the usage graphs.

Usage graphs

Usage graphs

 

IPV4 and reverse DNS info.

IPV4 configuration

IPV4 configuration

Adding an additional IP address

add another ipv4 ip address

add another ipv4 ip address

 

 

Recovery ISO

upload recovery iso

upload recovery iso

 

Take or recover from a snapshot

snapshots

snapshots

I didn’t have any backups but if I did they would have been listed here.

backups

Backups

I do my DNS through a free CloudFlare account. I highly recommend them to everyone. However if you could also use Vultr’s included DNS manager.

DNS manager

DNS manager

 

 

Settings

From the settings screen you can change your password, enable two factor authentication and enable API access.

Settings

Settings

 

Two factor authentication is much more secure. I highly recommend enabling it.

Two factor authentication options

Two factor authentication options

Two factor authentication QR code which I’ve blacked out.

Two factor authentication QR code

Two factor authentication QR code

 

 

Support

Vultr’s support is good and they also have excellent documentation. It doesn’t have as many tutorials as DigitalOcean but Vultr’s servers are much faster and there isn’t anything preventing you from using one of the many tutorials on the internet with your VPS.

Here we have the support interface. These tickets weren’t in regard to any problems that I had they were just a few general questions.

support tickets

support tickets

Documentation interface

 

Documentation

Documentation

Creating a new support ticket is simple.

new support ticket

new support ticket

Affiliate program

So now we’ve come to reason why I’ve put the effort into compiling this long list of screen shots. The affiliate program. Vultr pays $10 for each referral that’s over 30 days old and spends at least $10. It’s not as generous and many other web hosting affiliate programs out there but I don’t feel like I’m being at all dishonest when I highly recommend them. I’ve done the benchmarks and they outperform their competition.

Here we see my January 2015 referrals. I can attest that they actually count their referrals and pay their affiliates which is more than I can say for some other VPS hosting companies that I’ve worked with in the past.

affiliate program

affiliate program

 

I think I’ve covered pretty much everything so I might as well show you the log out screen

After logging out

After logging out

Log in

 

Log in

Log in

and finally the forgot password.

 

forgot password

forgot password

 

So I think that covers just about everything within Vultr’s interface. If you would like to give Vultr a try please use the big green button below.

Sign up for Vultr VPS hosting

I keep a list of any current Vultr coupons or discounts here.

If you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to let me know. If this post does well I’ll try to do one on DigitalOcean at some point in the future. If you would like to stay updated with my latest blog posts please join my newsletter by filling out you name and email address in the big black rectangle on the right hand navigation.

 

Filed Under: Hosting Tagged With: Hosting, VPS, Vultr

DreamHost coupons and promo codes

March 8, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

This page was last updated May 7th 2015.

DreamHost Coupons

DreamHost logo

DreamHost is currently one of the leading web hosts today with a positive reputation. DreamHost offers shared hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), cloud hosting and domain name registration.

This page contains the best available and most current DreamHost coupons and promo codes.

Use the coupon code “ODINFREEREG” and the big green link below for free domain name registration.

Host your site with DreamHost

If one of the coupon or promo codes on this page expires or if you know of a better coupon code please leave me a comment and let me know and I’ll be sure to update this page.

Filed Under: Hosting Tagged With: Hosting

WPEngine coupons and promo codes

March 8, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

This page was last updated May 7th 2015.

WPengine Coupons

WPengine managed wordpress hosting

WPengine  is a premium, highly-managed web hosting service for websites and apps built with WordPress.  WPengine currently has over 20,000 loyal customers that are provided with a simple, secure and excellently performing way to host their WordPress sites.

From now until the end of May, 33% Off the first 2 Months of a monthly Personal, Professional, or Business plans if you use the special code  “SPRINGTIME“  (without the quotes) and use the following link.

Sign up with WPEngine

I’ll do my best to keep this page updated with the best coupons available for WPEngine. If a coupon or promo code expire please leave me a comment and let me know and I’ll try to find a new one. Also if you have any comments or suggestions please let me know.

Filed Under: Hosting Tagged With: Hosting, WPengine

GoDaddy vs. HostGator vs. BlueHost vs. DreamHost

March 8, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge 5 Comments

godaddy vs. hostgator vs. bluehost vs. dreamhost

godaddy vs. hostgator vs. bluehost vs. dreamhost

I’ve seen people asking for hosting recommendations several times on Reddit, Quara and numerous other forums and they’re frequently asking which host is better between one or more of the large hosting companies GoDaddy, HostGator, BlueHost and DreamHost.

If you’re in that same position trying to figure out which one of the above mentioned companies will offer you the best deal and performance for your websites I hope that this post will shed a bit of light on the murky world of web hosting and hopefully help you make a more informed decision.

Stop using shared hosting, it sucks!

I know, it’s harsh to say that and that there may be a few exceptions somewhere out there on the internet, but as a general rule, shared hosting should be avoided.  GoDaddy, HostGator, BlueHost and DreamHost are all primarily shared hosting companies and the only  reason anyone ever used shared hosting to begin with was because it was so much less expensive than a dedicated server. Now that virtual private servers  (VPS) have become so prevalent and inexpensive there really isn’t any reason for anyone to use shared hosting any longer.  Selecting hosting based solely on the lowest possible price is how you end up with really unreliable hosting and horrible support. If support and reliability are important stop making price your sole consideration when comparing web hosts.

Shared hosting is unreliable

The typical setup with shared hosting will have up to several thousand websites hosted on one server. Any one of those sites could have a poorly written script or a large spike in traffic that could potentially consume the majority of the servers resources resulting in poor performance or downtime for the other thousand plus hosting customers located on the same server. Many websites on shared hosting will see a few minutes of downtime and extremely slow page load times several times daily.

Shared hosting is deceptively marketed

Shared hosting is often sold to via deceptive claims, half truths and omissions.

Here are a few common examples:

Unlimited bandwidth

When a shared hosting service claims unlimited bandwidth the reality is that once you use some predetermined amount of bandwidth the hosting company will either throttle the bandwidth to your sites so that they become so slow that your websites become unusable or they will suspend your account for violating their terms of service.  Think about it for a moment why would Google, Yahoo or Amazon spend billions on bandwidth if they could  get unlimited bandwidth for $10 a month. If any hosting company actually provided unlimited bandwidth they would be bankrupt very quickly.

Unlimited disk space

Disk space is actually very inexpensive. Even thought it’s cheap the shared hosting companies that offer unlimited disk space know that the vast majority of their customers will never use less than 100 megabytes of disk space and fewer than 1% will use more than 10 gigabytes.  When they market unlimited disk space they’re selling something that they have no intention of actually providing. Think for a moment how long it would take you to upload even one terabyte (1028 gigabytes) of data using your internet connection. The majority of internet connection in the United States offer asymmetrical bandwidth. That means that your download speeds are much faster than your upload speeds. For most people it would take several days or even weeks to upload even one terabyte of data.  Much like with unlimited bandwidth unlimited disk space will become very difficult to actually use if your intention is to actually use a significant amount of storage.

Fake reviews

The reason that you see so many recommendations for these companies is because the people writing the reviews are getting paid to write them. Each of these companies offers an affiliate program that pays 20% or more of what ever you end up spending on hosting to the person that got you to click on their affiliate link that takes you to the web hosts site. Affiliate links, banner adds and paid reviews is how the majority of bloggers, myself included make money and I’m no exception. However on my blog I only recommend products and services that I actually use for myself or for my clients.

Shared hosting is not a very good deal

Share hosting can be incredibly profitable for the companies that provide it and unfortunately good marketing does a lot better job at selling hosting than providing good hosting. The actual cost involved for the typical overloaded shared hosting package is minimal. Typical costs per customer per month are well under $1 monthly. Here’s a very realistic cost estimate you have a server, bandwidth electricity and infrastructure and employees to look over thing all of these costs added up are usually less that $200 monthly. Now on that $200 a month server many shared hosting companies will pack 1000 – 1500 customers each paying $5 – $15 monthly.  That $4800 – $22,300 in net profit per server.  I have no problem with people working to make money but that same $5 – $15 could be buying you a low end managed virtual server where you would be 1 of 100 customers with a much greater degree of isolation from having a server crash and your website becoming inaccessible than 1 of 1000 with no isolation at all. If you’re paying more than $1 a month for shared hosting you’re not getting good value for the money you’ve spent.

 

Why you should avoid GoDaddy

Deceptive and manipulate up selling.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of using GoDaddy you know exactly what I’m talking about. In order to make even the simplest purchase via GoDaddy you will be forced to wade though several pages of deceptively titled additional products and “services” which provide little value.  Many people complain about services they never intentionally purchased being added to their bill.

GoDaddy could steal your domain name.

If you somehow forget to renew your domain name and it expires Godaddy will buy your domain name the moment it expired and then attempt to charge you $400  to get it back. If you don’t pay they will auction your domain name off to the highest bidder. They claim that this is a “service” but it seems a lot more like extortion to me.

Support for anti-consumer laws.

GoDaddy has previously supported numerous anti-consumer and pro-censorship laws such as :

  • The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
  • PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)
  • The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

After a consumer boycott and a lot of bad press GoDaddy backed away from it’s support of these laws but the fact that they ever supported them is enough to keep me from ever recommending that anyone do business with them.

They’re so big that they won’t care if you need support.

GoDaddy is a huge company with a huge marketing budget that has demonstrated very little interest in actually supporting it’s customers. If you have an issue and need support there’s a very good chance that you’re going to end up extremely disappointed if you’re relying on GoDaddy.

If you’ve read everything I’ve said about GoDaddy and you’re still considering using their services perhaps some reviews from actual customers of theirs can persuade you to reconsider.

 

HostGator and BlueHost are actually the same company.

That’s right Hostgator and BlueHost are actually both owned by Endurance International Group or EIG. EIG acquires smaller hosting companies with good reputations and then “streamline” them. They do this by moving the customers of the acquired companies onto servers in their own data centers and stuffing as many of them as possible onto overloaded server.  They actually own and run over 50 different brands. By marketing over 50 different web hosting brands they’ve managed to create the illusion of competition.  Their brands are usually heavily marketed and you’ll find numerous dubious positive reviews for their services. If you’re wondering why you see so many recommendations on blogs for both Hostgator and BlueHost it’s because they pay relatively high affiliate commissions. There’s a good chance that you’ve found this article by searching for a comparison between HostGator and BulueHost. The reality is that it doesn’t matter which one of these two you choose as they’re both actually the same sub-par service with a different brand name associated.

Other EIG companies to Avoid

Here’s a list that I pulled from the EIG wikipedia page of other companies that are owned and operated by EIG and I would recommend that you avoid them all.

  • 2slick.com
  • AccountSupport
  • Arvixe LLC
  • A Small Orange
  • ApolloHosting
  • Berry Information Systems L.L.C.
  • BigRock
  • BizLand
  • StartLogic
  • BlueDomino
  • Bluehost
  • BuyDomains
  • Directi
  • Dollar2Host
  • Domain.com
  • DomainHost
  • Dot5Hosting
  • Dotster
  • easyCGI
  • eHost
  • EntryHost
  • Escalate Internet
  • FastDomain
  • FatCow
  • FreeYellow
  • Homestead
  • HostCentric
  • HostClear
  • HostGator
  • Hostnine
  • HostMonster
  • hostwithmenow.com
  • HostYourSite.com
  • HyperMart
  • IMOutdoors
  • Intuit Websites
  • iPage
  • IPOWER
  • iPowerWeb
  • JustHost
  • LogicBoxes
  • MojoMarketplace
  • MyDomain
  • MyResellerHome
  • NetFirms
  • Networks Web Hosting
  • Nexx
  • PowWeb
  • PureHost
  • ReadyHosting.com
  • ResellerClub
  • Saba-Pro
  • SEO Hosting
  • Southeast Web
  • SpeedHost
  • Spry
  • SuperGreen Hosting
  • Typepad
  • USANetHosting
  • VirtualAvenue
  • VPSLink
  • WebHost4Life
  • webhosting.info
  • Webstrike Solutions
  • Xeran
  • YourWebHosting

 

What about DreamHost?

DreamHost logo

Dreamhost is still primarily a shared hosting company and for that reason they’re not a company that I would normally recommend but they’re by far the best option of the four companies compared in this post. If you choose to use Dreamhost I would recommend their managed VPS hosting which is reasonably priced and much more reliable and with more consistent performance than shared hosting. If you’re determined to use shared hosting despite every reason that I’ve given you to avoid it DreamHost would be a much more reliable option with better support than either GoDaddy or any of the EIG brands.

Try DreamHost

Recommended hosting options

Now that we’ve covered why you should avoid GoDaddy, HostGator and BlueHost and how Dreamhost is the only hosting company of the four that this article is primary about that is worth doing business with I though that I would mention a few hosting companies that personally use and recommend. It’s important that the company that you choose fits your specific business requirements.

Managed WordPress hosting

WPengine managed wordpress hosting

If you’re site or sites use WordPress I would recommend using a hosting option that specializes in optimizing, securing and scaling WordPress sites. Currently the best available hosting for WordPress is from WPengine. WPengine utilizes several different cloud hosting providers and implements their own highly optimized software stack to provide the best available Performance and reliability for WordPress based web sites.  WPengine is more expensive than low quality shared hosting but if your dependent upon your website to generate revenue or referrals then hopefully you understand how important performance and reliability are. Hosting A single site on WPengine will currently cost $29 a month with a $25 site business plan going for $249 monthly.

Host with WpEngine

Managed Magento, Drupal, Joomla, PrestaShop, MediaWiki, or PHP hosting

CloudWays managed virtual private servers

For managed Magento, Drupal, Joomla, PrestaShop, MediaWiki, or PHP hosting CloudWays is currently my go-to recommendation. CloudWays offers managed cloud hosting on top of Amazon, Google, or DigitalOcean’s “cloud”. When you signup for CloudWays you are offered the option of choosing which cloud hosting service you would like your server to reside on, with Amazon and Google being similarly priced but more reliable and DigitalOcean being significantly less expensive but with slightly more downtime on average.  Once you’ve selected your cloud and server you are offered a selection of applications to choose from and CloudWays will configure its managed and optimized software stack. A server with 1GB of RAM and 1 CPU on DigitalOcean with CloudWays will cost around $15 a month while a server with similar specifications on Amazon or Google’s cloud will cost about $40 monthly. CloudWays also offers a WordPress stack but if you can afford it I would recommend WPengine over CloudWays for WordPress specific hosting.

Try CloudWays

Self managed VPS for Development

Vultr logo

Up until about six months ago I was using DigitalOcean for all of my development servers but Vultr seems to have copied their business model and surpassed them in every measurable way possible.  By no means am I saying that DigitalOcean is a bad service, in fact I think that they’re great it’s just that Vultr is even better. Vultr offers hourly billing and the ability to clone existing servers which is great for testing out different configuration options before deployment. A VPS 728MB Ram and 1CPU will only cost you $5 a month while a slower VPS with 512MB ram will cost you the same on DigitalOcean which is why I’m using Vultr for my development servers now.  I’ve written a fairly detailed comparison of Vultr and DigitalOcean if you you’re interested.

Sign up for Vultr

Self managed VPS for Deployment

RamNode

RamNode lacks the hourly billing and the ability to quickly clone or upgrade your VPS that Vultr offers but the performance of RamNode’s  servers and their support are both excellent.  If you need a single VPS for deployment of a project and you don’t need the ability to clone an existing VPS which can dramatically reduce the work required in deploying and maintaining a VPS, RamNode is an excellent choice.  RamNode consistently outperforms every other VPS hosting provider and their prices are competitive.

Select RamNode

Dedicated Servers

Choopa dedicated servers

Choopa is actually the parent company of Vultr which is my recommendation for VPS development servers. Choopa offers great low cost dedicated servers. If you’re in need of a dedicated server I would recommend giving them a look.

Choose Choopa

Conclusion

Avoid GoDaddy or any brand owned by EIG. DreamHost is great when compared to GoDaddy or EIG but you should go with a VPS over shared hosting and There are most likely better hosting options that are tailored more closely to your specific needs.

 

That’s it for my comparison of GoDaddy, HostGator, BlueHost and DreamHost. I hope that you’ve found this post informative and helpful. If you’re an employee of GoDaddy or an EIG owned brand I’m not really interested in hearing from you but if you feel like leaving a comment I’m not doing to delete it. If you have any comments, suggestions or noticed one of the undoubtedly many spelling or grammatical errors please leave a comment and let me know.

Filed Under: Hosting Tagged With: Hosting

.NET Core runtime CoreCLR released on GitHub

February 4, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

coreclr opensource on github

coreclr opensource on github

 

If you’re a .NET developer you’re probably exited to hear that the .NET Core run time AKA CoreCLR has been released on GitHub.

The code currently is running on Windows with support for Linux and Mac promised in the cumming months. Very soon we will have the ability to write MVC 6 web apps in C# or your favorite .NET language using Visual Studio 2015 and then deploy to a Linux servewith official support from Microsoft.

What is .NET Core?

.NET Core is basically a stripped down and streamlined and rewritten version of the .NET framework removing all of the windows specific code and functionality. .Net Core will provide the core functionality of just in time compilation and garbage collection of your .NET code and will allow support running and deploying ASP.NET vNext Model View Control (MVC) web apps on Windows, Linux and Mac.

Why did Microsoft release CoreCLR as open source?

It isn’t altruism that has led Microsoft to open up CoreCLR. Over the past several years Microsoft has been loosing market share on the web server. PHP has been around for years and despite it’s bad design and numerous security issues it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  Ruby has been gaining ground for years, Java won’t die despite Oracles best efforts and many new start ups are taking a look at Go.  More than a few .NET developers are tempted to leave the Microsoft development world behind and take up development with one of these open source alternatives. Developers and development tools have been a major reason for Microsoft past successes. Microsoft is scared of losing these developers and the the “enterprise” customers that they work for, which make up the majority of their profits.  Opening up ASP.NET vNext and CoreCLR and giving away Visual Studio  for free is Microsoft’s attempt at keeping as many developers as possible in the Microsoft sphere of influence while at the same time hopefully attracting a few additional developers. They are hoping that once a developer gains experience working on C# in Visual Studio they are more likely to work on a desktop app using C# and Visual Studio than abandoning windows entirely for Linux.

Why am I so excited about CoreCLR on Linux?

I’ve been working with ASP.NET since it was in beta with brief hiatuses while working on Java, Perl and PHP web sites. During that time I’ve come to appreciate Visual Studio and C#.  C# is a great programming language and Visual Studio is undoubtedly the best IDE available today. Unfortunitly I’ve found myself working less with C# over the past couple of years. This has primary been due to the fact that deploying ASP.Net apps on Windows Servers is significantly more costly than deploying apps on an inexpensive Linux VPS. Soon the cost of deployment should no longer be an issue. I’m looking forward to writing ASP.NET MVC apps in C# using Visual Studio and deploying them to a Nginx web server.

Another area of concern that I’ve has is the performance of .NET apps vs. apps written in code that is natively complied such as C and Go. Fortuitously Microsoft has also announced .NET Native. Apps compiled with .NET Native utilizes significantly less memory and provides greater performance than apps using the just in time compiled common language runtime.

A year ago I doubt anyone would have believed you if you told them that Microsoft would be releasing ASP.NET for Linux and now it looks like it will be here by summer 2015.

 

Leave me a comment and Let me know your thought on .NET Core, ASP.NET vNext and .NET Native.

Filed Under: programming, web development Tagged With: .NET, ASP.NET, C#, Linux, nginx

RamNode coupon, promo, and discount codes

February 2, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge 2 Comments

Last updated May 7th 2015

RamNode Coupons

I’ve been looking over my search engine referrals and I noticed that I’m getting several users per day looking for RamNode coupon, promo, or discount codes. Up until now I didn’t have any information regarding RamNode coupons on my site but If it’s what people are looking for I thought I would create a page specifically with that information.

What is RamNode?

RamNode

RamNode is a small virtual private server(VPS) hosting company with a terrific reputation for their quality and responsive support, extremely fast servers and low prices. I personally their inexpensive KVM VPS when setting up VPN’s and proxy servers but the majority of their clients use their virtual private servers as web servers.

They have data centers in :

  • New York New York, USA
  • Seattle Washington, USA
  • Los Angeles California, USA
  • Atlanta Georgia, USA
  • Rotterdam, Netherlands

 

Currently available RamNode coupons

You can clink on the following big green button and use the coupon below.

Choose RamNode

The coupon code “NICE10” (without the quotes) This will entitle you to 10% off of new KVM virtual servers in RamNode’s Atlanta Georgia or Seattle Washington data centers.

 

I’ll be sure to update this page as new coupons become available. If you know of a coupon, promo code that’s better, please leave a comment containing that information.  If this coupon stops working please be sure to let me know.

 

Filed Under: Hosting Tagged With: Hosting, RamNode

CloudWays Coupons, Promo codes and Discounts

February 1, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

This post was last updated on April 20th 2015

I’ve had many people ask me about coupons, promo codes and discounts for CloudWays managed virtual private server (VPS) hosting. So I thought that I would create a page containing that information.

What is CloudWays?

CloudWays managed virtual private servers

Cloud Ways managed virtual private servers

For those not in the know CloudWays adds server management on top of Digital Ocean, Amason EC2 and soon Googles “cloud”. Besides standard PHP web hosting they have implemented a software stack so that the following applications will perform optimally.

  • Magento
  • WordPress
  • WooCommerce
  • Drupal
  • Joomla
  • ProstaShop

I’ve contacted CloudWays directly and they’ve informed me that the best deal available is to actually use this big green CloudWays link.

By using this link you can sign up for a VPS managed by CloudWays on DigitalOcean’s “cloud” for as little as $5 per month. That’s the exact same price you would pay directly through Digital Ocean for the VPS without CloudWays management services. It’s a great deal.

 

Signup for a free 15 day trial with CloudWays

 

That’s it for this post. I’ll be sure to keep this page updated with the most current coupons, promo codes and discount for CloudWays services. If a coupon that is posted stops working or if you know off a better coupon please leave a comment.

 

Filed Under: Hosting Tagged With: CloudWays, DigitalOcean, VPS

The best VPS hosting options in Europe

February 1, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge 4 Comments

The best VPS hosting in Europe

The best VPS hosting in Europe

The other day someone left me a comment regarding the lack of good VPS options in Europe at a low price. His claim was that there are much better option in the USA and for a lower cost.

I thought that this would be an excellent topic for a post as I’m aware of several good VPS hosting options with servers located in Europe that are available for a reasonable price. In this post I’m going to provide you with some basic details regarding each VPS hosting service and make recommendations based on my own personal experience from actual usage, as well as extensive benchmarks that both I and other VPS hosting customers have compiled via ServerBear.com. I won’t be delving into the minutia of the benchmark result but if you’re into that I recommend that you head over to Server Bear and check them out. (Hopefully after reading this post)

Although the topic of this post is the VPS hosting on servers located in Europe, each of these VPS hosting companies also has data centers located in in the United States as well as in Asia and my recommendations are the same regardless of the location of the data center.

With the price of a managed VPS of acceptable quality, now as low as 4€ a month there is really no excuse for using low quality shared hosting any longer.

 

The reasons for choosing a VPS host in Europe

Proximity to your users

If you plan on configuring your VPS as a web server then page load times are important. The closer you are to the majority of your users the happier they will be with your site. People are willing to spend more time on sites that load quickly. Packets take time to travel from your server to your end users browser and the closer you servers are physically located to your users the less network latency your users will experience. This is part of the reason many large sites such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook use geological based DNS and load balancing.

If you’re planning on using your VPS for some other purpose the same latency concerns are still an issue.  When it comes to latency it’s generally better for the server to located as near to the majority of the people that will actually be using it.

Privacy concerns

Many people have concerns regarding NSA and other government agencies snooping on USA based servers.  My personal opinion is that the location of the servers won’t actually make much of a difference. I’m not sure exactly how much additional privacy protection hosting in Europe actually provides. Given that many European countries will work in cooperation with USA government agencies and the fact that the NSA snoops on the traffic that flows via underwater fiber cables that are connecting pretty much everyone.  However if you’re of the belief that the benefit is real hosting in Europe may be of interest to you.

Bypassin IP based geolocation access restrictions

You or your users may be located in a country that does not have access to content that is restricted based on the location associated with your IP address. A common way around such restrictions is the use of a virtual private network (VPN) or proxy located in the country that is allowed access to the gelocation restricted content.  A hypothetical examples would be setting up a VPN so that you could access to UK based Netflix while you’re living in Moscow.  There are several services that provide DNS based proxy services which bypass location based access restrictions. The best of which is probably Smart DNS Proxy. If you wanted to build yourself a clone of  a service like this you would need servers with IP addresses that have access to the content.

 

What are the European VPS hosting options?

There are literally hundreds of options to choose from.  I hate the blog posts that list the “top 100” type lists that provide a lot of links but don’t offer any real insight. I’m not going to waste you time and try to overwhelm you with low quality options. I personally use each of the VPS hosting companies mentioned and each for a different purpose.

Each of the four VPS host have the following in common:

  • Overwhelmingly positive reputations
  • Offer solid state drives for faster IO
  • Provide 1GB or better network connections
  • I have personal experience and am able to personally recommend their service.

I’m listing them in alphabetical order but will provide my recommendations after I’ve provided a brief synopsis of each service.

 

Digital Ocean

DigitalOcean logo

European data centers

Digital ocean has a total of four European data centers.

  • Three located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • One in London, England

Pros

Of the four VPS hosting companies in this review Digital Ocean has the most refined user interface on their website. They appear to be targeting novices to Linux Systems administration and they’re doing an excellent job at it. Their tutorial are excellent and I often find my self reading over them while I’m configuring servers with other hosts.

Servers are billed for by the hour or monthly.  Support for many different Linux distributions and Free BSD.

You can scale your server up as your site grows and requires more resources.

If you want to get up and running quickly Digital Ocean offers several applications such as WordPress, Drupal, Appache and Nginx which can be automatically installed and configured at the time of deployment. You can have everything up and running literally within two minutes.

Digital Ocean offers and entry level VPS with 512MB RAM, 1 CPU, 20 GB SSD, and 1000GB of monthly data transfer for $5 a month. These specifications are more than adequate for most small blogs or even several dozen static sites. If managing a VPS isn’t something you’re interesting in attempting you can get the same $5 Digital Ocean VPS with management for the same price if you order it via CloudWays  managed VPS service.

An API is available for integration and deploying servers.

Cons

Digital Ocean’s network can get congested which can add about one half of a second to your servers response time. If you’re hosting a web page where every additional milliseconds can and does have a negative effect on the number of page views and sales. The CPU performance is by no means bad but it can be the worst of the four compared if your on a heavily utilized host server.

Slowest SSD disk IO of the four VPS hosts compared.

 

Linode

Linode.com

European data centers

Linode currently only has one European data center with and additional one being opened in the spring of 2015

  • London, England
  • Frankfurt, Germany (Spring 2015)

Pros

Linode is targeting a different demographic than Digital Ocean. They’re marketing more to businesses that have knowledgeable staff that are experienced with Linux systems administration looking for a better option than the bigger and more expensive cloud hosting services such as Amazon EC2 or Microsofts Azure. Linode’s network is five times faster than that of each of the other VPS hosts mentioned in this post. (5GB vs 1GB) and the SSD that they are using are the quickest when compared to the others.

With Linode you have the ability to scale your VPS up or down depending on expected usage. This can be useful if you have a site that does not receive much traffic throughout the year but get a large amount of traffic around Christmas you can scale the site up for a month or two and then back down after the rush which saves money. The process will take the site offline for about half an hour each way so you would want to also have a fail over server. With the other Hosts mentioned in this post you can scale up but not back down so this can be a big advantage to using Linode if you have large variations in seasonal traffic patters.

If you need load balancing Linode is the only host on this list to offer them as I’ve mentioned previously they’re the host most appropriate for a site that’s getting a lot of traffic.

The price may not be as the lowest but at $10 for a VPS with 1GB of RAM, 1 CPU, 24GB of SSD storage and 2TB of data transfer it’s still an incredible deal.

Linode offers a web based server resource monitoring tool called LongView which provides terrific insight. None of the other VPS hosts on this list offer anything comparable.

Managed hosting and hourly systems administration are available. Linode bills $100 per month per server in addition to the cost of the VPS for managed hosting and they offer systems administration at $100 per hour.  It may not be the cheapest but If you’re in a pinch and you need it it’s available.

An API is available for integration and deploying servers.

Cons

The UI of their website isn’t the most user friendly. It looks like it was designed by a systems administrator. Everything is functional but at times I find myself searching the page for the correct link.

The CPU performance isn’t that good when compared to RamNode or Vultr.

 

RamNode

RamNode

European data centers

RamNode currently has a single data center in Europe

  • Rotterdam (suburb), Netherlands

Pros

When benchmarked their servers perform the best of the four VPS hosts when it comes to raw CPU speed.

Super low price low end servers ideal for hosting small static sites that don’t receive much traffic. As low as $15 per year for an OpenVZ based VPS.

Their current customers love them and their support. You usually won’t get anyone willing to go above and beyond for you at larger hosting companies.

Support for Windows VPS, if you need to set up a windows server for an additional cost it’s an option with RamNode.

Cons

Their website is clearly made up of several separate systems that have not been fully integrated into each other. The UI is confusing and frustrating to use at times. When using their site It quickly becomes very apparent that they are a small hosting company.

RamNode only offers monthly billing.  If you like to set up a VPS from a backup specifically for testing new functionality and then destroy the clone after testing this is a major con.

Most of the self service functionality available via the other VPS hosts mentioned in this post are missing from RamNode. Nearly everything requires opening a support ticket.

No API means there is no way to deploy and configure new VPS’s via code.

 

Vultr

Vultr logo

European data centers

  • Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Frankfurt, Germany
  • London, England
  • Paris France

Pros

Vultr seems to have positioned themselves as a direct competitor to Digital Ocean and Vultr outperforms Digital Ocean in every benchmark. They have a clean easy to use interface that makes deploying servers relativity painless.  They’re lowest price plan is €4.5 which is the same and Digital Ocean’s lowest priced VPS but the specs are better on the Vultr Server with 768MB of Ram, 1 CPU, 15GB of SSD and 1000 GB of monthly data transfer.

Vultr offers support of Windows VPS at an additional cost as well as the ability to deploy a custom ISO which is unique among the four VPS hosts that are being compared.

Hourly billing.

API for provisioning and monitoring VPS.

cons

Vultr’s network can get a bit congested and the IO rate off the SSD can be slow at times. This is a common issue among many VPS hosts.

 

Conclusion and recommendation

So what are my recommendations? It really depends on your needs.  Do you need a managed VPS or will you do the management yourself?

 

Managed virtual private servers (VPS)

Small web site, low cost managed VPS hosting

If you plan on using your VPS for web hosting and you would rather not have to worry about installation, security, and updating yourself you would go with a managed VPS. The least expensive way to go for a typical smaller website would be to use a CloudWays managed VPS on top of Digital Oceans “cloud”.  A reasonably provisioned server with 1GB of RAM will only cost you around €13.50 monthly.

Select CloudWays

CloudWays is currently offering a 15 day free trial on their managed VPS with 1GB of RAM.

 

Large site with redundancy managed VPS hosting

If you’re a larger business that has the need for fail over servers and load balancing and you would like to outsource the management of the servers for your site I would recommend going with Linode and paying the additional $100 per month per server in addition to the server costs for management.

A typical 2 server configuration plus load balancer with management will run you  around €300 per month. That price may sound steep but when compared to other managed server options it’s quite inexpensive.

Choose Linode

 

Self managed virtual private servers (VPS)

Web server with caching or static content

On web servers faster CPU speeds don’t usually equate to faster websites. For serving static content such as images, static HTML, CSS and JS files the quality of the network connection and the speed which the files are read from the disk have a greater effect on a web sites performance and Linode has both the best network and the fastest disks. In case you were wondering what I use for my own site, this site currently hosted with Linode. I currently host the majority of my clients sites on Linode  and do most of my development on Vultr.

Choose Linode

 

CPU intensive websites or Windows VPS

If you have a web site that can’t make use of caching and every page is served dynamically a faster CPU can improve a web sites performance.  Both RamNode and Vultr offer excellent CPU performance and they both also offer Windows as an option. The only thing that is keeping me from recommending RamNodes is the lack of hourly billing. I will often find myself testing new server configuration options using a cloned server based on a snapshot of live server. Fore this reason as well as the additional data centers I’m going to recommend Vultr. If hourly billing isn’t something you will need or want then by all means go give RamNode a try. I have a VPS with them that I use as a VPN/Proxy and it works great.

Choose Vultr

or

Try RamNode

 

You may have noticed that I didn’t recommend Digital Ocean for anything. They’ve been thoroughly defeated by Vultr in nearly every way considerable and I currently only recommend using them in conjunction with CloudWays.

 

I have a page with coupons, promo and discount codes for each of these services that I update frequently. You may be interested in taking a look if you’re planing on giving one of them a try. Rather than post the coupon codes here and potentially forget to update them in the future it makes more sense to link out to the coupon page and I’ll update them there as needed.

  • Linode coupons
  • Digital Ocean coupons
  • Vultr coupons
  • Cloud Ways coupons
  • RamNode coupons

 

That’s it for this post I hope that you’ve found the information in it useful and that I’ve been able to help you select the European based VPS with SSD that suits your needs.  If you have any comments or suggestions please leave me a comment.  If you would like a personal recommendation based on your needs either leave a comment or fill out the contact form. If you have any other questions that you would like answered I’ve also launched a new forum section for Q & A. You can also join my mailing list by filling out the form on the right hand navigation.

Thank you for reading.

 

Filed Under: Hosting Tagged With: CloudWays, DigitalOcan, Linode, RamNode, VPS, Vultr

The OdinSQL Forum has launched

January 24, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

I would like to announce the launch of the new forum on OdinSQL.com. If you have a question or comment regarding web hosting, WordPress, software, technology, gadgets or programming I would love it if you would contribute to the forum. I’m sure that it will evolve over time. I promise to do my best to answer every question asked quickly and thoroughly.

As always if you have any comments or suggestions please do not hesitate to let me know.

Filed Under: Meta

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