On the 21st of December 2010 the party holding the majority of the Hungarian Parliament voted in favor of a new media law that is a collection of some of the most aggressive and undemocratic laws from all over Europe, including some worrying new additions.
To show our concern for this violation of fundamental rights and free speech, im putting this post up and a link to http://www.blackout4hungary.net/en/ ^_^’ enjoy!!!!
I’ve had my fair of problems and gripes with SEO on wordpress, especially with the “All in One SEO Pack” you can check it out Alternative to All in One SEO Pack ^_^
So that was like a year ago, nowadays there are loads of plugins that do what i want or part of what i want, however cause there is no point in testing 20 plugins, im narrowing it down, so for this review im choosing just plugins that have a minimum set of features that i need (like meta tags in the head, canonical urls,…), that have been updated recently (last 3 months), that aren’t on the first version (at least a couple of updates under the belt) and that have a control panel, also i’ve tested all these plugins for obvious misleading or security leaks, at this moment they have none that i can see (actually one has, sorry made this intro before the testing hehehe).
Conclusion and What are you going to use?
Hummm this one is a big thought, but i would say the clear winners and real all in one seo alternatives are WordPress SEO by Yoast and Platinum SEO Pack, but for diferent reasons, if you want a clean, simple SEO option for WordPress i would go with Platinum SEO Pack, it has everything you need, but if you want a bit of an edge and more options and better understanding of the features, then i would go with WordPress SEO by Yoast.
S2R is officially moving all their WordPress Sites from All In One SEO Pack to Platinum SEO Pack, mostly cause i don’t need the extra features that WordPress SEO by Yoast offers and i don’t like the added junk that WordPress SEO by Yoast adds to the site header.
Well domains are an essential part of what makes the internet useful and easy to use, we really don’t need them, but our minds are generally not made to memorize big numbers like 145.234.211.841 (this is a ipv4 internet address, in the future with the introduction of ipv6 the numbers will be stranger and larger hehehe) so something like hostcult.com is way more simple to use and memorize (well secretly i wished icann would have made them even more simple, like just typing hostcult on the browser or hostcult.c).
Also brands wouldn’t be able to use the internet so well if, like if microsoft was 6427-7-38 (american phone keypad combination) instead of microsoft.com, so it makes sense to use domains, as the years gone by, i have used a series of different domain registrars to register all my domains, so here is a small resume of the domains registrars i use today and some of the ones i used (no point talking about registars that no longer exist, or that are not relevant today):
Godaddy
When: couple of years ago, about 10 domains.
Pros: pretty cheap at the time, still cheap today with coupons, pretty good feature set.
Cons: renewal fees are expensive, icann fees are billed separately (they always bill that as an extra while most domain hosts bill it as part of the overall price), confusing control panel, they keep offering/pushing their other services, they will cancel/suspend your domain at the slightest problem or dmca.
eNom
When: couple of years ago, about 5 domains.
Pros: cheap reseller, awesome control panel, pretty good pricing, reliable registrar, awesome support.
Cons: at the time, it was complicated to buy and put money inside of the account (you had to have money on your enom account so you could buy domains), also they weren’t the cheapest (even though now, they are one of the cheapest).
Onlinenic
When: couple of years ago, about 30 domains.
Pros: cheap reseller, average feature set.
Cons: convoluted payment system, lots of downtime, unreliable, horrible support, horrible control panel.
Namecheap
When: couple of years ago, about 5 domains.
Pros: large feature set, good control panel, good support, probably my recommendation if you have/want just a couple of domains, they are/were a enom reseller, so its a good platform anyways.
Cons: a bit pricey, still renewals are normally the same price as registration, so no hidden fees.
Domainsite
When: couple of years ago, about 5 domains.
Pros: simple and quick control panel, average pricing (even though i bought at the time with discount), interesting feature set, with unusual services, horrible support service.
Cons: renewals are way more expensive.
Moniker
When: couple of years ago, about 10 domains there.
Pros: cheap reseller, the best bulk registration i have ever seen, average feature set and control panel.
Cons: at the time it was being sold off or not, kinda weird things going on, so i moved on as a precaution, also because pricing is kinda average.
ResellerClub
When: today, around 150 domains there.
Pros: cheap reseller (the more you pay, the cheaper the price, because i pay a lot i have a pretty good pricing), reliable, average feature set and control panel, still they have been adding new stuff with time.
Cons: no automatic renewal system, every other month there are problems with they credit card processing company “transecute” (that i think they own or at least are very buddy with), support is average but normally takes a lot of time to get back to you
InternetBS
When: today, around 5 domains there.
Pros: cheap registrar, average feature set, average control panel, i tend to buy domains here if they are cheaper than on resellerclub and then transfer them over or not to resellercub.
Cons: none so far.
Notes:
Happy Xmas and New Year Woot Woot! and well have a super time, with lots of yummy stuff and hugs hehehe
Since i run lots of sites, things like performance, security, caching, stats are part of the daily routine of running them and of course of extreme importance, whats the point of having a kick ass site if its slow or insecure, so a couple of months ago i heard of cloudflare, basically its a proxy/caching system, but by using this caching system they provide caching for your dns, for site files, as well as intrusion detection, stats and a series of other niceties, this happens mostly because every time anyone wants to visit a site that is using cloudflare it will pass through cloudflare servers before reaching the site.
At first it sounds like an awesome product, first of all the basic package is already extensive and free, but even the paid version seems to have even nicer features and at a very affordable price (it would be nicer if it was $5 each site, and not $20 the first and $5 the remaining), especially comparing to somewhat equivalent CDN and Security systems available online, also impressive is the control panel, very simple but with lots of features (comparing with something like google analytics, its way better at presenting a one page overview), so i decided to test cloudflare and see if it was a good fit for the S2R network.
The testing was done with 3 sites, that have different functions, frameworks, servers, performance and traffic, this way i could see how effective cloudflare is, i do this by doing a initial setup and testing and then having a couple of site monitoring services checking up on the site as well as me randomly visiting them and testing again.
So the simple site was a domain hosted, blogspot powered site, basic template and its mostly a placeholder site while it isnt developed, so low traffic (about 30 uniques a day), low content, quick site.
Following cloudflare instructions and setup, change the dns and waited for it to change, it took about 5minutes for dns to refresh and the site showed first a nginx error (nginx is a webserver software), then after 5minutes a cloudflare logo saying that the cache was being made and after a total of about 15minutes the site was running on cloudflare, first of all this initial caching sucked, first errors, then cloudflare logos, the caching should be done in the background, start in offline mode and then turn itself on when it can cache so users should always see the site, although not too long, this was far from a transparent change, the site remained on cloudflare for around 3 weeks,
after about 2 weeks i got a site down warning, when i visited the site i got a topbar from cloudflare saying that the site was in offline mode (one of cloudflare features), after about 2 minutes of refreshing the site went back to normal, i don’t think it was down at all, still what made me not so happy was putting cloudflare logo and links on that topbar.
Site 2 – The Heavy Duty but Simple Site
So the HDBSS is a domain hosted on a shared server that runs a simple image board software, it caches all the pages in html, so basically its html and pictures, still the site is popular and has higher traffic (about 3000 uniques a day), large but simple content, and because of all the images it is slower to load (altough we do use caching for a lot of things, but i turned them off during this trial).
Again the cloudflare setup, this time around i didnt see any cloudflare logos or problems and the site runned fine from what i could tell, however somethings didn’t work, connecting to the backend (running php) was no problem, but the forms wouldnt work, my only doubt was that probably the captchas or ips were not matching (because of the proxy nature of cloudflare) and therefore the form wouldnt work, the strange thing is that other people could post, so on one part i was having some complains and could see that it wasnt working but posts still kept coming, i did try some workarounds like disabling the form captchas, disabling other settings, but that didnt work so the trial on site 2 was cut short to one day and a half, so after the dns change was complete, the site returned to normal, so the likely culprit was indeed cloudflare, so FAIL!
Well not that complex, but its a domain hosted on a server that runs 2 copies of wordpress (long story), its somewhat popular (about 1000 uniques a day), its a ecommerce site, with large dynamic content, in this case i left wordpress caching (w3 caching) and installed the wordpress plugin from cloudflare.
Setup run smooth, but this time around when dns kicked in i only saw the ngix error, i went to cloudflare help and there said it might be my firewall, so i checked, no, but i put the exceptions anyways and contacted the server host for them to check (later i received that they didnt blocked anything as well as my firewall and that the ips from cloudflare connected correctly), i waited for 30 minutes and then reverted the changes, so again a FAIL!
Conclusion
Humm this didnt went at all like i expected, i didn’t do all of these at the same time, this was done randomly during about a 2 month period, so if there were problems on cloudflare side, then they were recurring, however there are 2 things that concern me regarding cloudflare,
First all the links and logos from them, anytime something is wrong they show their logo, i dont think that is userfriendly it should show the logo of the site in question or just a plain text warning from the site in question, showing cloudflare is confusing to any visitor, ohhh whats happening i thought i was going to vacationparadise.com, where is the site? what is this cloudflare??? is cloudflare there to catter to webmasters or to the general public? cause if i buy CDN from Akmai or Amazon they wont show their logo’s in my site, now would they.
Second it seems too forceful, its make it or break it, if it runs at first it probably will run fine, if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t at all, also their system is purely proxying, so you have to install plugins to make it work fine and for example report links, its too easy to break your site, that risk just for some caching and some security is not a good tradeoff, better to optimize and use caching.
So my opinion of cloudflare is that its actually a pretty impressive product, especially their site, the features and customization even on a free product, but their caching seems limited, i didn’t see any real performance boosts from my tests (even though their panel says its like twice as fast, real life tests from multiple sources didn’t show me that, its more like a few ms and i think mostly cause i don’t use gzip and cloudflare uses it) as well as all the links and logos to cloudflare are ridiculous in my view, from the offline mode and from the initial cache, and probably for the “question pages” as well, even tough i didn’t get any, but i did have one my visitors complaint that the site was blocking him from visiting because he had javascript turned off (probably noscript or something), so that’s a bit worrisome as well, i would say the service has good promise but for now it shouldn’t be used by anyone that runs more than a hobbist site.
Update: I’ve done another updated review of cloudflare! check it out!
We all know backups are important, if shit can happen, shit will happen, they are important both online and offline, but if you are hosting a site or several sites, its important to have a backup strategy, that’s why S2R created the 3 Tier Backup System (sounds way more exciting than what it is):
1) Hosting Provider Backup System
2) Offsite Backup System
3) Local Backup System
With a three tier backup system, it might look a little paranoid, and you might take some time and money to build it, but now that its done, its easy to add new sites and the peace of mind it gives is priceless, and now i can eat right in front of the computer hahahah ^_^
DNS (Domain Name System) Server is used to lookout domain names to ip address, it has more purposes, but for the most part thats their function, public DNS providers are free to use DNS servers that provide that function to anyone that needs it.
So since you are online the DNS service was probably provided by you ISP as part of their system to get you online, so why would you like to change your DNS provider from your ISP to a public one?
The main reasons, in degree of importance, in my view are:
1) Security, your ISP probably uses standard off-the-shelf dns software, also DNS although important is not a priority, security tend to suffer first, especially when new tricks and flaws are found, things like dns cache poisoning (injecting dns records that are not from a authoritative dns server), also phishing or malware or other kinds of security risks can be averted by using a stronger more secure dns provider.
2) Performance, every single time you put a new domain name, that name has to be resolved on a dns server for the domain to show up, that means performance is essential, especially comparing to your ISP dns server that is extremely close to you.
3) Control and Customise, the ability to take control of your dns, of using it to make your browsing faster or check it domains are there, if you mistyped, if there is malware on the page you want to visit, or blocking kids from accessing certain kinds of sites.
So the list here follows a different pattern since im going to check the speed of it (from 3 different locations) as well as my personal preference depending on features and overall performance:
1) Google Public DNS (Like: Speed and Standards / Dislike: None)
2) OpenDNS (Like: Speed and Security / Dislike: DNS Hijacking)
5) Level 3 (Like: Speed and Standards / Dislike: None)
4) Comodo Secure DNS (Like: Security / Dislike: None)
Notes:
1) the checks were made from California (USA), London (UK) and Faro (Portugal) using namebench http://code.google.com/p/namebench/.
2) i could have made a huge list, but i prefer to provide the cleanest most objective one, than a random copy paste list, so i removed lots of other good public dns providers, just cause at the time they were giving me errors and not performing normally, like scrubit dns, cisco or norton safe dns.
3) opendns would have won (just about the same performance as google public dns), but i personally prefer a dns that gives an error when it fails and doesn’t hijack or disrupt sessions by pushing their search when a server is having a glitch or dns issues, but that’s just me.
Ahhh nothing like autumn to get you inspired, well not really, muhahaha, still lots of new shinny things to come from the nice folk at S2R:
Expansion of the S2R Network, yep new sites, a bunch of them are coming, while most are well in Portuguese, and some are revamps (like panchira), there will be some niceties all round, both in new sites and oldies ^^
Much Improved Hosting, performance is always something we aim for, S2R’s hosting is now spread through the world, well mostly around the US of A, in places like Los Angeles, Dallas, Orlando and Kansas City, but in the UK and Netherlands as well, so i hope most, if not all sites will have better performance, we will also be rolling out support for CDN, for extra performance.
On the home-front, some upgrades on some of the computers (so expect faster website building muhahaha), but mostly my custom multiple TB backup system, so all my sites will have 3 layers of backups, from my hosting provider, from an off-site backup and finally to my new backup system, AWESOMEEEE ^_^
Yep yep, kudasai had a major improvement, that’s how i like to do it hehehe try stuff out and keep improving, partly because of some complaints, partly cause it had some not so user-friendly “features”, so here are some of the improvements:
This isn’t gonna be a how-to increase the performance of whm/cpanel, there are loads of awesome tutorials online and i’ll link so some of those in the bottom, this is just some of the tips I’ve learned over the years, that can and do, and make a difference on the performance of your vps / vds / dedicated box using WHM Cpanel.
1) Disable Unused Services
WHM is a complete package it takes care of the services, of making and managing the account and updating the server and itself, because of its versatility it has all these services and more that you would want from a hosting server, however all of these services are not required and some of them are serious performance hogs, so these are the ones you should check out and if you dont need, disable:
2) Tweaking Settings
4) Upgrade / Update
This one is simple… not always having the latest and greatest is the best course of action, but there is a tendency for newer software to have better performance, less bugs and generally more secure, so when in doubt, always update, in this case, its setting up whm to update itself to the CURRENT or STABLE releases and make sure security packages are also on automatic, also from time to time running the easy apache, and the updates on the Software section (Server and System).
5) Keep an Eye on it and Adjust
Since every box is different (although im talking here about LAMP+WHM/CPanel), there are multiple variations of LAMP (using CentOS instead of Debian, or php4 instead of php5), also it depends on the sites/services you are doing with the box, if your sites are dynamic you kinda want to adjust php, if its a file server, you kinda can move to nginx (or another lightweight server, instead of apache), if you have a lot of Mysql work, its another thing, so not all rules or changes will work best, so keeping an eye on the performance of the box is important, not only if the CPU and RAM are good, but also how quick your pages load.
I know there are a lot of more tweaks you can make so check these articles for more in depth tweaking (or just make a search yourself), however just doing the ones i told should keep your box humming away pretty good ^_^
Check …
Optimizing cPanel/WHM
Optimize High-Traffic Servers
Configuring and Optimizing MySQL For WHM Dedicated Server/VPS
Well i ordered a new box and found out that it was running Apache 2.0.63, a very stable version of Apache (still used by lots of webhosts), but since like a year ago, i’ve moved to the 2.2 branch, so to decide what was the best choice i decided to do some testing between both version to choose, humm performance wise?, and yes i know 2.2 is much better regarding speed, but performance is not just about speed, so i just installed one and then the other, did some tests and let it run for a full 24hours midweek (cause weekends the traffic drops a bit)
So what are the results, interestingly enough… im gonna make some charts ^_^
Average 24h CPU Load (Restricted to 1CPU)
Average 24h Memory (Restricted to a total of 1GB)
Average Requests of File Types
Ok charts are cute but were are the numbers? well there isnt a point or need really, since the site hosted (and test files) on the box are not a perfect benchmark of Apache’s abilities, this should be considered above all a real world test, than a well measured test, but we can take a conclusion out of this, just looking at the charts, Apache 2.2 branch does seem to perform faster than the Apache 2.0 branch, although that performance increase is traded by a slightly higher cpu and memory consumption (about 0.3% memory increase and about a 6% CPU load increase ), hummm i can live with that, 2.2.15 WIN! hehehe, besides newer software has a tendency to bring better performance and security, and in the long run thats always smart thinking.