New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
See no privacy issues for non-ecommerce website. It is possible, but not very probable that they would sell my WP admin password. All the other data is public.
But this thread does provide some food for thought and further consideration.
You're right: setting up the right TTL is probably the most important!
@bikegremlin
Sorry, I'm out of the discussion with you, at least for the moment. You are jumping all over the place (re. topics). If you believe in the CF religion, good luck, I Won't try to missionize you away from that belief.
Well, 60 min. can be a very long time ...
More importantly though is the question, on what you can rely. Can you, for example, rely on 2ndary resolvers respecting your config? Can you rely on some plastic router box or ISP or who knows what browser on what OS acting as good netizens?
Based on personal experience and tests I found that slow name servers (auth + slaves) can and quite often do pull a sites performance (as seen from the browsing user) very considerably down.Also keep in mind that caches are limited and unless your site is quite major chances are that it's simply not in the cache.
The end user device, will surely cache it for 60 minutes.
Regarding respecting the TTL, sure 60 minutes is reasonable, most will respect them.
Some even force a minimum TTL and reject 1 second TTL's.
There is a chance, that the request goes from the cache of the nameserver you asking. But if your Nameserver is fast, means it does not long to reply even if the request is far away like 200 ms it should not do a big impact.
To get something with always low latency, you would need AnyCast and most of us run 2 nameservers, in different locations, where you can face 200 ms or even 300ms.
In a good case you have 20-80ms which is good.
No really benefit between the 10-20ms you get from Cloudflare, if your site is properly optimized surely the end user wont notice any difference.
I'm not much into believing - prefer knowing.
Based on good information provided by you and other members, I'm considering whether to limit CF to DNS, or keep non-ecommerce sites as well, or completely ditch it all together.
Trying to figure pros and cons and see what's best.
Since one good measurement is better than a 1000 expert opinions, I'll also test the local website version, on a server close to home, with CF disabled - to see if there's any performance improvement. There should be, but would prefer testing and confirming.
And there is always the possibility to have a 3rd or a 4th NS or to use some decent DNS service provider if really needed.
But still, I made that point for a reason: site performance is more complex than "just use CF" and DNS is one example of an often overlooked factor.
False, CloudFlare selectively semi-randomly disables PoPs (especially if you're on a free/cheap plan). Which means your Australian visitors might get routed to Los Angeles (even though CF "has a PoP there") while your server is in Frankfurt.
CloudFlare also mostly has no backbone (despite their Argo claims, which I almost call false advertising), so it just routes stuff over transit anyway.
You definitely want fast responses. 60 minutes is a long time, most people do like 5 minutes now. DNS recursors also need to spend the time requesting data from the your resolver, which is also the time your end user spends waiting.
@bikegremlin
Your website may be more optimized than those who simply do one-click installations and leave their websites at that, but surely it isn't optimized enough on a shared hosting environment. Currently, cpanel still does not have nginx, which performs better than apache most of the time. You likely are using caching methods that rely on plugins so you're making use of php scripts that may not run well to cache things. Maybe you also have plugins that minify css/js or do other things but all these things can work better if done server-side. There's some other things you could do with a vps that you cannot do on shared hosting. If you had several cpu cores, you could assign cores to do different things, eg. 1 core on nginx and 1 core on php. You won't be limited by the number of entry processes. Your vcore may be a lot of limited than you think, because 100% load when you update posts sounds off to me - unless you crawl the entire site when you update posts. Besides, if I recall correctly, though hostmantis gives you 1 core, if you use more than sustained 25% of a vcore that's considered abuse. There's many other things that can be done if you have full control. Maybe you can compile a better optimized php? Maybe you can play around with compression methods?
It's true that most use cases don't require a cdn. However, if you had a eshop where you'd really want to keep your audience's attention, you wouldn't want the site to load slowly for them. Eshops always have a lot of images (sometimes high quality ones) which may warrant a cdn.
If you have a decent domain registrar, chances are, their dns is more than good enough. There's not much reason to use cloudflare for the dns alone, unless you want their cheap renewal rates. I've read on this forum before that cloudflare dns occasionally has downtimes and is slow, though I never verified that myself personally. One thing is for sure though, cloudflare controls a significant portion of the internet and I'd rather not use them where possible.
@smallbibi
NginX:
Currently using Litespeed server and caching plugin. It does all the compression, code minification and caching. My understanding is that, although it seems to be the fastest of all the WordPress caching setups/plugins I've tested, Litespeed is aimed to help reduce the server load primarily and nginx should provide even better website performance (unless the server is overloaded, of course).
Reseller vs VPS:
The line of thinking with reseller is the following:
A 2 core 2 GB RAM VPS is what it is. VPS-s also get oversold and even there one isn't allowed to use 100% of CPU 100% of the time - correct me if I'm wrong.
A reseller offers 1 CPU and 1 GB RAM per cPanel (account). So each subdomain (using a separate WordPreess installation) would get 1 cPanel, allowing:
mydomain.com
english.mydomain.com
shop.mydomain.com
to get 1 CPU and 1 GB RAM each (with HostMantis in particular, non would be allowed to use over 25% CPU for more than 5 minutes).
So until either one of those websites becomes a resource hog, this setup looks to me like a good enough choice, especially on a budget.
I believe (haven't tried) a properly set up, not overloaded 2 CPU 2 GB RAM VPS would outperform that still. Just don't think the websites still warrant that (and that cost). Resource use of my highest traffic website (with 50 concurrent virtual visitors load tests in the previous days):
WordPress:
I'm not sure how it works "under the hood"; how the database is structured, but when changing/editing a category under which many posts are listed, CPU and IO get high loads (don't do this often, it's something rarely done).
DNS:
I'm using Namecheap domain registrar. It does allow the use of their "Namecheap BasicDNS".
I'm currently using Cloudflare's DNS - with the domains registered with Namecheap. Didn't/don't feel comfortable registering my domains with Cloudflare. Their DNS, on the other hand, has worked flawlessly with numerous websites/domains I've set up. Though I am considering switching to Namecheap DNS and ditching CF all together.
One advantage of CF DNS I still see is with client websites. I needn't have access to their domain registrar at all. I prefer having as little access as necessary - and I think domain registrar (being able to change the password, re-route the hosting server IP) is a very serious thing to have. It's not about whether they trust me, it's that I think it is professional to protect people from myself, to put it that way. The aim is: if anything happens to me, clients should have all the needed info, written in such a way, that any tech. literate person can continue the work. With using CF DNS, their domain registrar info is not among the needed things - they can keep that to themselves, protecting the ownership of their website.
Well it depends on what you pay. You could get the 2 cores dedicated, but it'd be significantly more expensive than if it was just the regular "fair use" type allocation -
1 core 4 GB dedicated would cost $15/month from buyvm.net for example ( https://buyvm.net/kvm-dedicated-server-slices/ ).
That's why you have to take into account where your backend is located. If that's on the US east coast (as is @bikegremlin's server) it seems to me that for most asian/pacific locations CF will only make things faster. It should not hurt in US/EU, even if it won't be really "needed" for a fast loading of the site. That being said, in my testings australian visitors mostly ended up on their australian node. I'm not saying that they are perfect, or should not be avoided. Just that as performance is more complicated than adding CF in front of a badly setup webserver, adding CF in front of a well configured server won't magically make things really worse, unless this server is hosted somewhere really close to your target audience, even more so if this is in the Asia/Pacific region.
Apache ain't that bad. The problem is the underlying choice for PHP, which you can't decide on your own on a shared environment, and many hosts still use mod_php. Apache with MPM event & php-fpm is pretty fast. That being said, if you cache your pages and have setup the proper .htaccess rules, cached pages will be served statically, and it's possible to serve pre gzipped assets if you want (cf https://www.keycdn.com/support/wordpress-cache-enabler-plugin#apache). Some shared hosts offer litespeed, with decent caching capacities "out of the box".
So what @jsg basically states, is that you should spend all your free time learning/optimizing everything yourself instead of focusing on content creation? Not everyone that creates content online is a tech genius...
I've no idea why you hate cloudflare this much and is not really important because is not the target but the process that is actually hurting you as you've probably spent a couple of hours in this thread alone hating on them. Get outside, take a walk, meet with some dudes and have some fun, companies like cloudflare will always be around to taunt you so you should stop paying attention to them and focus on what's important to you instead.
Ugh, what's with this nice xaoc?? You're all a bunch of cunts!
/thread
Compared to vps, I think almost all providers would allow you to use 25% constantly, and some may allow 50% constantly etc even at a decent price. This obviously depends on the provider and the price you pay. Remember, when you pay for shared hosting, the price factors in things like cpanel, litespeed, softaculous and whatever other licensing costs. When you pay for a vps, you're really paying for the hardware and ip, so relatively better hardware since you pay less for licensing.
That is also true if you have your own nameservers, you don't really need cloudflare for this. But in such a situation I do see the benefits of cloudflare, since everything is made simpler. I think cloudflare allows you to share domains with other accounts as well? Which makes it pretty cool for hosting sites for a few friends/clients I imagine.
If this is your bike wordpress blog, I imagine things are being cached, so your pages are more static than dynamic. How this works is after each page is loaded once, it gets cached so they don't have to be generated again. So if cloudflare doesn't have your static files cached, they request them from your server, then caches it and sends it to all subsequent visitors. If cloudflare has your static files, they just send them to visitors directly. Even if you had no cloudflare, your server only has to send static files directly to your visitors. This is the reason why cpu load/ram usage is low. If you had just 5 visitors logged in on a ecommerce site, most likely you would be using more cpu/ram just for those 5 visitors because its dynamic, meaning things are going on in your server to show them pages. I really get where you are coming from, because I am a cheapo and like to play around with things despite my noobness. But I really believe a vps is going to be worth your while if you're looking into building a eshop.
Cloudflare is a decent free service, but alas, it is not for everyone.
I just sent a link to this thread to a colleague who's knowledge, experience and wisdom I value a lot (even though he's an asshole, of course!
) - to hear what he thinks of it.
He wasn't too thrilled about using Cloudflare in the first place: saying it is another thing that gets in between, another node that can get malfunctioning, or working not as expected - on a setup that is already complicated (server, Cloudlinux, Litespeed caching, WordPress with its plugins and peculiarities...).
My decision/conclusion so far had been that it's more good than bad. Expecting an "I told you..."
Performance wise it's turned out to be helping. Those close to the server get a split second longer load time (that is still fast), but those away get faster page load times.
Privacy/security wise - that I hadn't realised until reding this thread.
https://dns.he.net is a solid one. You definitely should give it a try.
Wrong. What I say is that things should be done professionally and well reflected. If you can't do it yourself then use a professional service provider.
Plus I say that being 2 or 3 times cheap, e.g. using a (too) cheap VPS plus free CF plus free DNS is bound to lead to a worse result than properly judging ones real needs and then getting a decent VPS incl. decent services.
Of course, you don't. Because you haven't understood my arguments (and probably not cared to actually read them).
But so what, here's a "I'm cool" cookie for you.
Your speculations("arguments") provide very little insight into the reason of your hate towards CF hence why my confusion. You can keep you cookie tho, i don't do sweets.
@xaoc
Thanks for the laugh!
Do yourself a favour and get back to "content creation" ...
What led you to believe i am a content creator? Was it my "perfect" grammar?