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VPS.net issues: what’s up and what will they do about it?

Joost de Valk — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:10:56 +0000

When I posted my interview with Terry Myers about cloud hosting, I wasn't really prepared for the backlash that would come in on that post. Quite a few people responded and a lot of them weren't too happy. On top of that, there were several instances of downtime in both the AMS and several US clouds over the last week. As you might know, I'm an affiliate for VPS.net, so I get a bit better every time they get a new client through me, but I was seriously debating whether that was still a wise choice. In fact, some people were telling me that I should stop recommending them altogether.

Now, I've been with VPS.net for quite some time, from their very beginning in fact, and I've always liked the service and the people working there. I'm not one to easily leave and on top of that, having had issues at other hosting companies before, I know that things are bound to go wrong at some point. So, I decided to confront my contacts at VPS.net and "talk to the boss". That boss is someone I hadn't spoken to before, Rus Foster. Rus has recently (7 weeks ago) joined VPS.net as their new Managing Director, although he's been in the VPS business for years, replacing Nick Nelson, who's gone higher up in the UK2 Group.

As you can see, I asked him some, I think, rather tough questions. I was happy with the answers I got, and must say that the changes he's talking about below on the AMS cloud have indeed had a very positive effect on my yoast.nl server.

Interview with Rus Foster, MD of VPS.net

Hi Rus, thanks for agreeing to this interview. My goal is to shed some light on what is currently causing all the issues around VPS.net. First of all, it seems as though every day, somewhere in the world, a VPS.net SAN dies. Some locations have more issues than others, but in general, it's been quite bad lately. What's causing that? And, more importantly, what will you do about it?

Start with the easy questions eh? Nothing like whats your favourite colour? :)

Seriously though yes there have been SAN issues on some of our newer clouds.

Some of the SANS in multiple locations have been showing instability issues caused by the software running on them. As such we are starting to undertake a very aggressive upgrade schedule to move the SAN software to the latest version. Coupled with this we are also upgrading the storage network within each cloud to increase I/O speeds.

We are however also looking to start using the enterprise class Nexenta storage solution on our new clouds which is engineered fundamentally different to our current SAN solutions. The upshot of this is that the system is much more resilient to failure meaning in the event of a failure there will be no noticeable effect on customers.

This will be going live on our next cloud but more about that later .....

When you say "very aggressive upgrade schedule", what do you mean, exactly?

We have identified 6 clouds where we feel significant upgrades, or full migrations to new facilities are required. We are doing 1-2 clouds a week and aim to have everything completed within the next 6 weeks, if not sooner. This is a significant investment in our infrastructure to increase resiliency and performance.

To be fair, some people would say that it's a significant investment to make it work the way it should... Which clouds are we talking about?

There were decisions made in the past that were right at the time. Those choices however no longer reflect customers expectations as cloud hosting is becoming more mainstream. We are making decisions now that prepare us for the future allowing easier service enhancements to be rolled out to all our customers new and old. We are targeting clouds in both the US and Europe. Some of the work, for example on our Amsterdam cloud, has been completed.

Could you say that maybe you've grown a bit too fast? (Which would be partly my fault, perhaps, sorry about that)

We learn from mistakes. There is nothing wrong with growing fast. There is something wrong with not managing that growth. I would say that is where as a company we found ourselves tripping over our own feet. My personal focus is split into both pushing the growth of the company, looking at exciting new markets and technologies but also its vitally important that we look after our current customers. This is reflected in us bringing back such old favourites as sales live chat but also focussing on how we can help existing customers. This include things such as the cloud upgrades as well as some exciting upgrades we have coming for all customers.

Apart from the SANs, another issue seems to have been the fact that you weren't responding during those outages, either on tickets, or on Twitter, with the status blog being deafeningly silent too. What are you going to do about that?

Communications. Communications. Communications. Nothing travels as fast as bad news. We need to be quicker. We need to be more open. We are taking steps to do that. We are now proactively emailing customers in the event of an outage. We are making it the sole responsibility for the manager on duty to communicate with customers. The status blog and twitter are important fields of communication but they can't give customised responses to each customers. Our support ticket system is in place for that.

I've seen you jump in on more and more tickets yourself, are you one of those managers on duty?

Its best to lead by example. I never ask anyone to do something that I wouldn't be willing to do myself. When things get busy in an outage its really a matter of needing all hands to the pumps. Thats why you will see me replying to all sorts of support tickets from simple reboots to full implementations of load balancing.

I get the feeling, talking to some of the people who bought a VPS, that they actually shouldn't have a VPS. They have two types of downtime, the one caused by themselves as they don't really know their way around a web server, and the ones caused by SANs or other hardware failures at VPS.net. I think that for people who have a lot of those first issues, the new Cloud Hosting, or a somewhat faster WestHost package, both a bit more managed, would be better for them.

Do you agree? If people think that's true for them, is there any way for you to help in that?

We all love power. As a petrol head I dream of having a TVR Sagaris on the drive but do I need the power? Of course not. Some people do however need that power. It's all about what matches your individual needs. If people just have a few websites that need to "just work" then a VPS isn't always the best choice and there are other things in our current, and upcoming, product range that could suit them better. If however people do require large amounts of customisation VPS are still a good way to go. If they do require that little bit of hand holding they can always get an On-Demand ticket for a one time issue or pop management on top for unlimited help.

If a customer wants to move to another product we can move a reasonable number of sites free of charge.

Cool.

So you mentioned a new cloud... Tell me more.

Yes our Japan cloud is the first cloud to be running our new Nexenta storage system and OnApp 2.2. It will also be live next week. Coupled with this, as we know people might be a bit wary of the new solution, we are doing first month, free of charge, for customers new and old. There is a limit of 10 free nodes per customer.

What can customers do if they think they deserve more attention?
They can contact me directly at rghf@vps.net.

VPS.net issues: what’s up and what will they do about it? is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Cloud Hosting, Cloud Servers, what’s the difference?

Joost de Valk — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 15:21:56 +0000

Recently VPS.net introduced Cloud Hosting, a new solution that differs a bit from their VPS Cloud Servers. I'm very, very happy with that product. Finally there's something in between WestHost hosting, which I've been loving and promoting for a few years now but really is only for the beginning blogger, and the far more advanced VPS Cloud Server. You see, some bloggers might get more traffic, but that doesn't mean they can easily configure their own server.

I was talking about this with Terry Myers of VPS.net, and decided to turn it into an interview, so here we go:

Terry, could you introduce yourself to the readers of Yoast.com and tell us what your role at VPS.net is?
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to chat with you and your readers today. I'm Terry Myers, the Chief Evangelist for VPS.net. I've been working with the company for a little over the past year, working in a couple of different roles. The great thing about my role with the company is there isn't a real set job description, so I find myself going wherever the customer needs me. My day to day tasks range from chatting with our customers on Twitter, where you can follow us @vpsnet, to working with our engineers to setup a complex multi-server cluster for our customers. Both of which, are oddly enough, equally as exciting to me. I'm guess I'm a bit of a social nerd.
What is the difference between Cloud Hosting and a VPS Cloud Server, which would you advice to whom?
Our cloud hosting is a product we recently launched in May of 2011. When doing market research we found that there was a lot of demand for an easily administrated cloud hosting solution. What we've done with our cloud hosting product is essentially created a shared hosting product that you would get from any web hosting company, and then combined that with our cloud infrastructure. What you get is a shared hosting account that is built off of the cloud, which means it's easily scalable, while also having extremely good redundancy, as there are multiple servers available for your site to run on.What makes this different from our cloud servers, is the cloud servers require a bit more technical skill, requiring you to administrate the web server. Our cloud servers are like a private web server for your specific website. Where they're advantageous over the cloud hosting is they have a bit more flexibility, in that you can configure the server in fashion you need, while also being able to handle more traffic.
Between the two products, I really feel that we have a solution for almost any customer. If you're running just a basic website, our cloud hosting will likely work out tremendously well for you. If you have a site that requires a unique setup, or a site that receives a significant amount of traffic, then our cloud servers can suit your site well.
WestHost is a sister company to VPS.net, what's the difference between WestHost WordPress Hosting and Cloud Hosting?
The WestHost WordPress hosting solution is a great product. It lets the customer get up and running with a wordpress installation in just a few minutes, and that works out very well for a lot of people. The difference between the two products is with the infrastructure used on the backend. The WestHost WordPress hosting uses dedicated servers that are shared amongst multiple customers, like any traditional shared hosting arrangement. It's a solution that makes for a stable, and affordable hosting experience.Where our product is a little bit different is that instead of using dedicated servers to host our clients, we use our cloud infrastructure. We're essentially able to create servers on the cloud to host our cloud hosting clients, which benefit from the instant scalability the cloud offers, along with the auto-failover abilities. What this means for our clients is if one client is put on a site like Digg.com, we're able to immediately add resources that'll prevent their site from going down. Additionally, if one server in the cloud experiences a problem, like a hardware failure, that has no effect on the clients. The other servers in the cloud just take over the work that it was doing.
Especially in WordPress hosting, there seems to have been a race to the bottom in prices. Slowly people seem to realize that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, yet they'd like to know what kind of support they can expect if they pay a bit more, after all $20 a month still doesn't allow you to have a dedicated engineer. What's VPS.net's service like?
We've definitely seen a shift in the market; people no longer are looking for the absolute lowest price, instead they've started to look at what their hosting company can offer them, and support is definitely a big part of that. We have a team of support engineers that are solely focused on our cloud hosting product. We're seeing average response times under 15 minutes, with the issue being resolved by the 3rd response, and on average, in less than 1 hour.
That's actually quite impressive! Thanks for your time Terry, I'm quite sure my readers will know where to find you if they run into issues with their new Cloud Hosting accounts!
Thanks. I'll definitely be around on Twitter.

Cloud Hosting, Cloud Servers, what’s the difference? is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

SEO Hosting

Joost de Valk — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:45:20 +0000

How bad hosting can lead to losing SEO rankings

Downtime of your website can lead to vastly decreased performance in organic search. I've been saying this for years, and have had some small examples to show for it. Now though, I've got a great example that I wanted to share with you. The client in this case was Independer.nl and they lost a very important ranking (for the word autoverzekering, Dutch for car insurance) for half a day due to unscheduled downtime. It's a perfect example of why good hosting and monitoring are so important.

What happened was that at around midnight, the servers would start to run a backup. A very smart process to have in place, of course, but for the course of that backup, about 10-15 minutes, a small percentage of visitors would be redirected to a "temporarily not available" page. This page gave a 404 error, causing Google to remove the page from its index, because it thought the page no longer existed. Good thing Google checks pages that have given a 404 error again after a while, so they didn't loose their rankings forever but just for the course of about half a day.

Several things are wrong here: first of all the page should have given a 503 status code, which means "temporarily unavailable". If it had, Google would just have come back to it rather quickly and not have removed the page from its index. Second; the page shouldn't have been redirecting or giving an error at all; your backup process should run without that much influence on your website. That's the only proper way of not having your hosting affect your SEO.

SEO Hosting & monitoring

Now of course, the minute you see your page has entirely disappeared from the ranking for a word that is getting you tens of new clients a day, you shit your pants. There was something that gave away that it wasn't a long term issue though: the listing had not just dropped a few places, it had in fact entirely disappeared. Normally, pages don't do that, the only two ways of disappearing entirely would be either a removal by hand because of spam or a page that had been down.

yoast.com uptime as measured by pingdom

Luckily, we were using Pingdom to track the uptime of the site, and we knew quite rapidly that they were having issues keeping their site up at night. So if you've ever wonder why SEO & hosting are two topics I care for so much, it's because this example shows they're one and the same.

This is why I love VPS.net so much, I've had 2 minutes of down time in August, and those 2 minutes were probably my own fault as I was tinkering too much with my live site again...

By the way, VPS.net offers an add-on service called Server Density, which monitors several aspects of your site including its uptime. You can enable this on the upgrade page, and should then after a short install process, if you have an iPhone, install their iPhone app. Then, if you notice that you need more CPU or RAM, you can now just simply add this on VPS.net without even rebooting your system!

Working on SEO? Hosting is important!

So I guess by now you'll agree with me, that if you work hard for a client on their SEO, hosting is a very important factor that should not be underestimated. Take care of status codes for error pages, and make sure you monitor their uptime.

SEO Hosting is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Change domain, and warn your visitors

Joost de Valk — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:25:32 +0000

When you change domains, for instance using my moving WordPress to a new domain guide, you'll usually redirect your visitors with something looking like this:

Redirect 301 / http://new.example.com/

The only issue with this is that people might not notice that you've moved to a new domain, and thus might not update their links to you. As Matt Cutts confirmed a while back that 301 redirects do not pass full PageRank, and they seem to take a hell of a time to kick in these days, that's somewhat of an issue: we'd rather have people update their links.

The proper redirect

So we want to tell people that you've moved to a new domain, but only people who came through old links to your site. And we still want to keep that 301 redirect in place, to preserve as much of the value from the old site as we can.

So, what if we redirected to http://new.example.com/#moved? The search engines don't care about anything from the hash onwards, so the value of the redirect would still be maintained. We could then use javascript to detect the value of the hash tag, and display a notice to our visitors.

There's an issue with that as well though: with the redirect 301 / line above, we redirected everything after /, to new.example.com/, so for instance /test/ would be redirected to new.example.com/test/. If we added #moved to the end of that URL, we would end up with new.example.com/#moved/test/ and that wouldn't work. So we'll need to make a bit of a fancier redirect:

RedirectMatch 301 /(.*)? http://new.example.com/$1#moved

That should work. Notice though that when you have code in place adding a / to the end of your URL's if not existent, that code should conserve any hash tags in the URL.

Showing the domain move message

So now, let's move on to the javascript part to actually show people a "we've moved" message, which is actually pretty simple. You create a div with the message you want to show, and put it in your footer, something like this:

[/code]

As you can see, we default it to display: none; so not everybody sees it, and then you add this tiny snippet of javascript, also in the footer of your page, after you've loaded the div above:

if (document.location.hash == '#moved') {
  document.getElementById('domainmovemsg').style.display = 'block';
}

Example code

I've coded an example of this with some more styling etc., which you can find here. If you want to see it in action immediately, you'll have to click this link.

Change domain, and warn your visitors is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Are you listening to the WordPress Podcast?

Joost de Valk — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 06:39:01 +0000

So it might seem like this blog is low on updates, which it is in text posts, but Frederick and myself are doing the weekly WordPress Podcast (which I really have to update the pages for). If you subscribe to the Yoast RSS feed or to the WordPress Podcast feed, you'll get those podcasts delivered straight to you. Of course, you can subscribe through iTunes too!

Are you listening to the WordPress Podcast? is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

WordPress Hosting

Joost de Valk — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:06:51 +0000

You can find my WordPress hosting article here, because of an experiment the comments for that article are here, while the article itself is "on it's own".

WordPress Hosting is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Using a CDN for your WordPress blog

Joost de Valk — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:52:49 +0000

Yoast.com uses the MaxCDN WordPress CDN service. When I started using this, the speed improvement was mind boggling. Before, I could only get the front page of this site to load in about 7 seconds, measured by Pingdom, (check here, f/i). Now, the front page loads in about 1.1 second, and sometimes even less... You want to know how to do that right? Thought so.

What is a CDN?

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network. Basically, it's a bunch of highly optimized servers all across the world, with a bit of unique logic worked into them: you'll always hit the server that's closest to you. This leads to huge performance improvements for sites that have visitors from all across the world, like this one.

My images were coming from the US, which was better for like 50% of my readers but pretty slow for a lot of my European readers (about 35% of my readers are European). Now, for them, these images can come from the CDNs servers closest to them, in a lot of cases, this CDN server (which is based on the Akamai network), would be in their ISP's server room, yes, that close. The servers of this CDN are literally all over the world.

The CDN works with so called Pull URL's. This means you specify a directory on your server that it pulls all files from, which it then starts serving from the CDN. This allows for a few quite neat tricks, for starters, to serve all your uploaded files from the CDN quite easily, once you've done some WordPress stuff that I'll of course take care of for you.

I've moved several things onto this VPS.net CDN:

my themes image files
my themes js files
my themes css files
the js files that come with WordPress that are not hosted by Google (eg. thickbox)
all my uploaded files

You know how much work that is? Literally 10 seconds. You go into your W3 Total Cache settings, enable the CDN function and enter your VPS.net CDN URL, and you're done.

Who should be using a CDN?

Because it distributes your data across the globe, a CDN is beneficial for pretty much everyone. Larger blogs and sites with a lot of traffic, sites serving videos or other downloadable files benefit most, as it speeds up these downloads. Other sites that benefit are sites that are often on Digg or other huge sites - as it spreads the load across a network of servers, rather than just one.

This VPS.net CDN stuff must be expensive! (it's not)

You were thinking that, right? Well, that's what I thought too. Turns out I'm wrong, they told me pricing for the CDN will be $0.05 a GB, pay-as-you-go, with a minimum purchase of $50. So you could buy 1TB for $50 and it could last anywhere up to even a year... And as one account can be used on multiple sites, if you put it on a white label type domain, it'll be very useful to a pretty big group of people. It's also good to know that most good CDNs (including this one) don't charge for storage, just for bandwidth.

So you want it now right? Well, go get it!

Using a CDN for your WordPress blog is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Playing around with VPS.net

Joost de Valk — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:00:53 +0000

Update: my WordPress blog is now hosted on VPS.net, check out my article on WordPress Hosting, you'll also read there that I actually use a different image than the one below, though the steps are almost the same.

So the guys who run WestHost and provide me with my awesome WordPress hosting, are a sister company of the guys that run VPS.net, and they recently gave me a VPS to play around with a bit. I kinda liked how easy it was to get a VPS up and running with a TurnKey Linux / WordPress image on it, the only issue was it was version 2.5 and needed updating.

Though they told me that would be changed pretty soon (meaning the image will support a higher WP version), I made a quick video on how to do all this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have to say it was a pretty nice experience, if you're looking for a VPS, this is pretty much top notch stuff (being a nice combo between a VPS and cloud based hosting) and it isn't expensive.

Playing around with VPS.net is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Magento performance hosting

Joachim Houtman — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:40:54 +0000

The system requirements of Magento are quite extensive, it requires at least PHP 5.2.0 extended with mcrypt, PDO_MySql and simplexml. For the database Magento needs at least MySQL 4.1.20 with InnoDB storage engine. At MagentoCommerce.com you can find a complete list of requirements. But how do you know if your server meets these system requirements? Check this and follow these three steps.

How to get the most out your Magento install?

Magento is notorious for it speed and performance. But isn't necessary to have a killer web server to get very reasonable performance, it is all about the configuration of your server and the code of your template. However, after the 1.3 release there are some performance improvements, like Frontend Flat Catalog, and people measure reduction of loading times up to 40%. Another recent development is the Magento Compiler this module compiles all Magento files. From tests this module gave between 25% to 50% better performance. This module is still in beta and should not be used in a production environment for now.

The question is, what else can you do to speed up your Magento install?

Optimize your template for speed

More information can be found at the Magento SEO article.

Enable compression of your files

Mod_deflate allows output from your server to be compressed. To enable it for Magento edit your .htaccess, around line 74, in Magento root directory.


############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

Apache Module mod_expires

mod_expires controls the setting of the Expires HTTP header and the max-age directive of the Cache-Control HTTP header in server responses. To enable Expires HTTP header for Magento you had to change the code underat your .htaccess to.


ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"

Use PHP Accelerator

Install a PHP opcode cacher such as APC or XCache. This seems to deliver rather large improvement in the responsive of the Magento install. Some people note a reduce of loading time up to 70%.

Tune your MySQL configuration

You can modify the configuration of the MySQL server to take advantage of the server's RAM. The efficiency of this step are different, it seems to depends mainly on the number of products. When you have only 100 products, difference will be hardly to notice (below 100ms). But for shops with over 50.000 products there is a huge reduction of the loading time. To give an idea about the settings, for shops with only a limit number of products a query_cache_limit of 1MB will be enough. For larger stores the optimal query cache value can be 64MB. To get the optimal value you really need some testing. A good start point for your Query Cache configuration can be found here.

Speed up your Cache files

Magento makes extensive use of file-based storage for caching and session storage. The slowest component in a server is the hard drive, so if you use a memory-based file system such as tmpfs, you can save all those extra disk IO cycles by storing these temporary files in memory instead of storing them on your slow hard drive.

Let´s do this with tmpfs

Let's say your Magento install is at /var/www/domain.com/ so your cache and session directories are /var/www/domain.com/var/cache/ and /var/www/domain.com/var/session/ For cache we will allocate a max of 256MB RAM and for sessions 64MB RAM. It is important to give access to everyone (e.g your webserver Apache)

mount -t tmpfs -o size=256M,mode=0744 tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/cache/
mount -t tmpfs -o size=64M,mode=0744 tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/session/

Now it might be a good idea to restore these volumes each time your server boots. Just add the following lines to your /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/cache/ tmpfs size=256,mode=0744 0 0
tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/session/ tmpfs size=64,mode=0744 0 0

Please note, your tmpfs is temporary in the sense that nothing will be created on your hard drive. If you reboot, everything in tmpfs will be lost.

Save the sessions in your database

Another option for the sessions is to save them in your database. Magento supports this very well and it is one small step to make this work. Just edit app/etc/local.xmland set

it will then save all sessions in the database which is a much quicker access than the filesystem. When you use a cluster enviroment you had to use this option.

Enable Apache KeepAlives

Enable Apache KeepAlives, this allows persistent connections. These long-lived HTTP sessions allow multiple requests to be send over the same TCP connection, this can result in an almost 50% speedup in latency times for HTML documents with lots of images. An example setting can be:

KeepAlive On
KeepAliveTimeout 2

Need more Magento Performance?

Ok, you are a very successful online retailer and it is time to cluster, no problem. This means that one single-server doesn't have enough power to keep your customers happy and so you need a clustered environment with two or more servers. A first step can be to start using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

The most easy to start is using an separate media server, e.g. media.domain.com. Magento has native support for this. You can configure 'Base Media URL' secure and unsecure under web configurations. This allow you to serve media form one server without the needs to synchronize any directory. Another option is to start using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for delivering the static files like images. MaxCDN has some options for Magento that are quite nice.

Another option is to use more than one database servers this tactic is called "database replication". One database will be the "master" and all others will be called "slaves". The master is the only database that accepts any sort of write-base queries. These write queries are then replicated to any of the slave servers in real-time. A post at the Magento blog will get you on the right track.

To summarize, 5 quick wins

move the the rules in the .htaccess files from the directories to virtualhost configuration directives
install Xcache or APC PHP cache accelerator
clean up your template and layout
make sure Apache KeepAlives is enabled
use a memory-based file system for Magento's var/cache/ and var/session/ directory

Conclusion

This article give a introduction how to improve your Magento site performance, none of these tips are revolutionary. Because every website's scenario is different, when you really want to get the most out of your Magento install you need to hire a professional. The only way to discover the optimal server configuration is testing, a really great tool to use is Browsermob, load testing with real web browsers so you will able to put even the Magento checkout process under load testing.

Now, all of the above you can’t do on your average host, you need a VPS that provides you full control of your server environment. Check out WestHost’s sister company, VPS.net, for a VPS environment that would give you full control.

Magento performance hosting is a post by Joachim Houtman on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

6 Serious Questions for Serious Bloggers

Joost de Valk — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:22:07 +0000

While it's a hobby for a lot of people, for more and more people, blogging is serious business too. Are you serious about your blog(s) and blogging? Maybe you're even making a good income out of it? If so, you'd better make sure you can answer yes to all of the following questions:

1. Do you know first when your blog is down?

I've had this happen to me in the past quite often, people emailing me or calling me telling me my site was down. A few months ago, when I decided that my blog was one of my most important business ventures, I started making moves to make sure I was the first to know when my blog went down.

That's why I've started using Pingdom. Pingdom checks my site every minute, and will tell me by email and SMS if it hasn't gotten a signal for 2 times in a row (you can configure that very easily) and on top of that, it gives me graphs like the one below, which measure my site's response time.

You can add checks for 5 sites in a normal account, so you can either share it with some other people, or use it for a couple of blogs. Of course you can add more sites, you'll have to pay more though.

2. Do you use reliable hosting?

When I wrote my last post on WordPress hosting, I was surprised by some of the reactions. The "yeah they're not that good but they're cheap" kind of comments made me wonder whether these people are really serious about what they do with their blog. Whether you're blogging for a profit, or to build a name for yourself, a lot of downtime will reflect badly on you.

It really is better to pay a bit more for hosting to prevent those 10 downtimes a year, and trust me, you'll sleep better too!

3. How do you treat your regulars?

Any business that can have the benefit of regular customers should be working hard to turn normal customers into regular customers and then treat those people well. For me there are three kinds of very important regular customers / visitors to this site:

Feed subscribers, through RSS or e-mail
Mailing List subscribers
"Normal" Regular visitors

Are you making sure these people get what they expect from you? Or, even better, are you giving them a special treat sometimes? For instance, my last plugin, a plugin that improves your posts slugs, is only available for subscribers to my mailing list. That turned out to work very well!

Another thing I do is thanking first time commenters, by using my comment-redirect plugin, and asking them to subscribe to my feed. This is both because I love the fact that they commented and gave their opinion or shared their wisdom (as should you when you've finished reading this post!), and because if someone is engaged enough to comment, that's also the perfect moment to ask them to sign up for your RSS or mailing list.

4. Do you know what people love you for?

The most important thing to know when you have recurring visitors, is to know why these people are coming back. Why? Well if for instance, you write a lot about cats and do the occasional post about dogs, but most people read your blog because they like your dog posts so much, maybe you should be doing a bit more of that, right?

How you know what people like you for? Use vanity searches everywhere. For instance, I have a vanity search on Twitter, that recently showed me this tweet:

Now that tells me that this person likes my WordPress tips, good, I've got loads of them! Now you should be making sure you know stuff like this too by using searches like this on Twitter and Google Alerts on your own name and your blogs name. You'll always know what people feel about you and your blog!

5. Is your blog well kept?

When your blog gets older, pages and posts will sometimes move, or other things may occur that lead to search engines having listings for pages on your blog that no longer exist. Or other sites might be linking to pages that no longer exist. Do you know if that's the case on your blog? Do you keep track of your 404 (aka "page not found) errors?

If you don't, now is the time to start doing that. If you use WordPress, my way of doing that is installing the 404 notifier plugin, and adding the RSS feed that provides to my feed reader. Any 404 that should be fixed I then fix immediately with Redirection.

Another question to ask yourself about your blog:

6. Is your sidebar there for your readers?

I see so many cluttered side bars these days that I'm getting sick of them. There's a couple of things I might be slightly interested in, like your FeedBurner stats, your Twitter followers and your Technorati authority, or your ranking on any major blog list, but you have to keep asking yourself: do I add yet another button because I like it, or because I think it will benefit my readers?

If your answer is "it's only for me", consider making a small page on your blog for yourself that keeps track of those things, and don't annoy your readers with it!

6 Serious Questions for Serious Bloggers is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

WordPress Hosting Parties Reviewed

Joost de Valk — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 11:00:00 +0000

Update: I've had a run in with a couple of hosting providers, but I'm now hosted by two different UK2Group labels: VPS.net and WestHost, and so should you be, read more about WordPress hosting here!

One of the most important things when you're starting a new blog is to consider where'll you host it. This decision also relies on smaller choices like which platform you will use, how much bandwidth you will be using, how much disk space you need, etc. etc.

This post should help you decide what you need hosting wise, to prevent you from having to move your blog when it get's popular.

Update: After reading this post, please, please, share your experiences in the comments. To make this post truly valuable, we need to be able to draw from your experience too!

WordPress.org itself suggests that you host with one of the following companies:

Dreamhost (keep reading for a big discount!)
AN Hosting
Host I Can
BlueHost
MediaTemple
Laughing Squid

The stats I've compared them on, and some of my findings:

Maximum disk size
With Laughing Squid offering a meager 300 MB, they disqualify themselves almost straight away, as the rest of the hosting parties offer 100 GB upwards of storage. Unless you plan on doing a photo blog with loads of pictures every day, I doubt you'll reach the 100 GB limit soon, so other then Laughing Squid, there are no real losers here.
Included bandwidth per month
Other than what a lot of people think, the internet isn't free. It seems to be almost free though, as most parties include decent amounts of traffic. Be aware though that if you are going to host your own video or a lot of images (and why would you want to do that?), you'll have to take a good look at this.
Number of email addresses and aliases included
While I doubt this will be the breaking point for you in a hosting decision, it IS important to know upfront.
Whether you can access your hosting account through FTP and SSH
Not everyone will need SSH access, everyone will need FTP access at some point. Well everybody provides for FTP access, but if you need SSH access, be sure to check the table.
Does hosting party have a One Click Installer for WordPress?
You can safely live without it, but if it saves you a couple of minutes (or hours) work, it might be a reason to "go for it".
Is a free domain included?
Really important? Probably not, but they are contained in the price, so it needs to be here for an honest comparison.
The price when you prepay this package for 1 year
In all cases I've gone for the cheapest package, prepaid for 1 year, so that the comparison is honest.
How many issues there are on the WordPress.org support forums?
Probably one of the best measurement of both how many people use a host and how much trouble they give is the number of cases for the hosting party in the support forums. This number has two sides though, you'll probably want to check for yourself how the cases are handled if you think you'll need a lot of support.

The results:

	AN Hosting	bluehost	Dreamhost	Host I Can	Laughing Squid	Media Temple
Disk Size	500 GB	Unlimited	500 GB	2 TB	300 MB	100 GB
Bandwidth	5 TB	Unlimited	5 TB	20 TB	20 GB	1 TB
Email	?	2500	Unlimited	Unlimited	5	1000
FTP access
SSH access
One Click Installer
Domain included?	1 free	1 free	1 free	1 free	No	1 free
Price with 1 year prepaid	$83.95	$95.40	$69.40	$76.32	$106	$200
Issues on WP.org forums	18	463	371	25	11	100

To be honest: if you're not TechCrunch, you'll probably do fine with every hosting party as far as disk size, bandwidth, email is concerned, as long as you don't go for Laughing Squid. What's left is pricing, and with my discount code ($50 off for the first year if you use promo code "yoast"), DreamHost is by far the cheapest.

If you look at all of this the biggest question is: which of these hosts can survive a Digg frontpage. Honestly: I can't test that. MediaTemple boasts that their GridService is the best service for this kind of situation, and I can tell you that it does indeed work, but the pricing is high.

So, currently, my advice would be to go to Dreamhost, or, if you think you'll hit a lot of big social media sites often and you can afford the somewhat higher price, Media Temple. If you choose cheap hosting, you might want to consider getting some proper email hosting on the side to prevent loosing email...

Whatever you choose, good luck with your WordPress blog, and remember to sign up for my WordPress newsletter!

WordPress Hosting Parties Reviewed is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

WordPress 2.6 Windows hosting issue

Joost de Valk — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:01:34 +0000

If you're hosting your WordPress blog on windows, you might consider holding off a bit on upgrading to 2.6. A bug has come up where permalinks aren't working the way they should... The issue has already been addressed in the support forums, but a fix hasn't been submitted yet.

I found out the hard way because Nina upgraded her blog, and her permalinks broke. We had to insert a category and tag base, which she didn't have before, to make it work (that is the "official" work around), but it isn't the nice clean solution you'd like.

On a side note, if you're considering WordPress, and want to host it yourself, I highly recommend Linux WordPress hosting over Windows hosting: you should go with WestHost, if you ask me...

WordPress 2.6 Windows hosting issue is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Annoyances and weird stuff

Joost de Valk — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:52:35 +0000

So somebody copied virtually all the code from my robots meta plugin, put it in a "Platinum SEO" plugin, and conveniently forgot to attribute the code to me... The GPL isn't that hard to deal with, but somehow, people manage to fuck even that up. I've emailed them and posted a formal complaint to the wp-hackers mailing list, asking for the removal of the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory until the code is properly attributed. Don't people get that doing stuff like that can get you in court? It's plain copyright violation... If a reader here happens to be a good copyright lawyer and wants to play, let me know :)

Another nice thing a friend pointed me at today is that if you're sending out email, at all, and you host or register your domains through GoDaddy, you might be in for some pain. Apparently, they can take your domain hostage if someone files a spam complaint... GoDaddy never had the best reputation, but this is another reason to urge you to switch away from them.

Annoyances and weird stuff is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!