Website

Update on website performance and security

by

Long time no hear! My last blog post has been a while ago, I’m sorry for that. I may have mentioned possible reasons for that (or maybe excuses) in some other posts already. I’m busy in the office, and when you’re working as a customer, there is not the same level of troubleshooting (and thus the source for blog posts) as when you would work as a partner (vendor => partner => customer, from an IT tech perspective). I know, that might be only an excuse. We’ve got plenty of servers, stuff in the cloud, and therefore one may say there are plenty of problems. But no, there’s not much. Honestly. But anyway, I’m still keeping the troubleshooting stuff on my radar, and if there will be some good and beefy issues, I’ll document that and blog about it. Because in IT, you’ll be probably not alone with that problem. And any blog post can help.

What’s up then?

Today’s topic is not about virtualization, networking, storage, or anything else in that sphere. It’s about an update on my website’s performance and security.

Recently we had a discussion in our team on how to improve website performance in general, how complex it could be, what solutions could be applied, and who should be on board with such a project. After the “official” part we had a chat in our core team about our personal websites, website monitoring, performance, etc. and we stumbled across some speed test websites. I mean, we’re all somehow nerds, isn’t it? No offense!

Read more

New Year – New Hosting?

by

To make the long story short: this week I moved my blog to a new web host. And I was surprised and pleased with how well and smooth everything went. But I’ll don’t just let you alone here. I’d like to explain the how and why I moved.

When I started with WordPress as my blogging platform, it was all just fun and games. Nothing technical, no helpful blog posts, just tinkering around, having fun writing. But with my engagement in the IT community, with my career in IT, I have rethought. I stopped playing around, and I started writing actual helpful blog posts. I started to write in German because this is my native language. At some time I switched to English, not without a reason (or more actually more than one). I have often dealt with English-speaking customers, with hotlines from international companies. And today at my current employer, English is the de-facto standard when opening tickets internally, or talking to other people in different time zones. I switched to English because most of the IT people I know, personally and on various social media, are native English speaking or understand English. Maybe I also switched because of reaching more people with helpful blog posts. And when I check the blog statistics, most visitors are from the United States. So, not a wrong decision at all, switching to English.

But enough of the forewords.

The why

When I moved my blog from one host to the other back in the days, I was looking for more speed. If you know WordPress, then you know it’s all PHP and MySQL, which can be highly dynamic content. And from a webserver perspective, dynamic content can’t be delivered as fast as static content. But, in my humble opinion, that was back in the days when there wasn’t much SSD storage in the webservers, or it was expensive, or with old PHP versions, etc.

My previous web host had also WordPress, but not the traditional way. He offered static WordPress hosting, which made me curious, and I wanted to give it a try. You’ll get a WordPress instance which you can start whenever you want, write your blog posts, do the other stuff, and shut it down. After that, you’ll create a so-called artifact, which renders all the dynamic content from your blog into static files. All your text, CSS, and JS files, images, etc. will then be put onto Amazon CloudFront automatically. And that’s the static content you’ll get presented when visiting the website. The performance was good, good enough for me.

But it has also some downsides. Some native WordPress features, like comments, search, or some plugins, just don’t work like this. They can’t be static because they relate to the dynamic WordPress in the backend. I had to find solutions for many problems. And I’m still not sure, even if I was able to test it successfully if it really worked.

I decided to move back to my original web host, where I have my domain running since 2008. Not only because of that but also because of the aforementioned circumstances. I’m also born in Switzerland, and my blog has a Swiss TLD (.ch), but with that TLD it’s still (highly) visible also international. My new web host caught me with a good hosting package, which has 250GB of website storage and is backed by 100% NVMe SSD, with Nginx and Apache running in parallel, 50MB of Nginx cache, and many other things. And that for a reasonable price, at least by Swiss standards. Yes, it may be true that many things are more expensive in Switzerland than abroad. But not everything.

That’s the why.

Read more

My website just got an update – speed and design

by

“A long long time ago, I can still remember how…”

You all know that song. It’s now two years ago when I moved my website the last time from one provider to another. And no, this blog post doesn’t talk about another move. It’s just a small update on how my website is performing and what I did the last few days and weeks to make it perform and look better.

Back in April 2018, I published a blog post about my website now being serverless. The reason why I wanted to go serverless was website performance. I stumbled across some Tweets, talking about the search functionality on a website, not using a word or tag cloud, etc. All of this has led to the fact that I have dealt with the topic more intensively and at that time moved my website to a new hosting provider. In the end, I decided to go serverless with my website. But that wasn’t easy. I love WordPress as a blog tool or publishing platform, or whatever you would call it. It is easy, flexible, and you can do so many things with WordPress.

But WordPress is based on PHP for the frontend and MySQL as the backend database. And that’s all dynamic content. Each blog post you read, every function on the website will be executed or rendered dynamically. That’s not speaking for high performance directly. There are some techniques, such as caching plugins, or other tweaking tools, to make the website performing better. But it’s still dynamic content in the end.

Read more

CoSchedule – Your #1 Content Marketing Calendar

by
CoSchedule

When i recently surfed through the web, gathering information about possibilities and technologies to get at least some automation into my blog, i stumbled across CoSchedule. I’m an IT guy, and i like some things working automated. So why shouldn’t that work on my blog? Is it because i’m lazy or because it’s just hard work sometimes to get all things well organized and orchestrated?

So i took a closer look at CoSchedule. And what i found out really amazed me.

What is CoSchedule?

CoSchedule is your #1 marketing calendar. Your automation buddy on WordPress. Your virtual publisher. Create great content and CoSchedule will do all the publishing on the social media channels you like. You define what and when and CoSchedule does the rest for you. You don’t have to worry about shorten links anymore, or to search for the permalinks to your blog posts for re-publishing them on social media. Does that sound to easy to be true? Read on!

How can it help me?

When you’re a blogger or writer then you probably know that better than anyone else. You were spending hours with researching, testing and writing, and you published a great article at the end. Now you’re planning to publish it on your Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts and pages. But you have to do it all manually. Copy the permalink, getting it shortened (on Twitter each letter counts…), add some hashtags and so on. Then you’re problably ready to get this post published on your social media.

And that’s a one timer. Your blog post is now available on the internet and various social media streams. But only once. If you’d like that your content gets more attention you probably should replublish it some days later, and probably also a week or two later. How about keeping your top blog posts a while longer on social media? You go through the whole process from above. Again and again.

CoSchedule can do that for you. In the very same moment before you click on “publish” you can define on which social media channels your post should be published too. You can define how often it gets published there and thus how long it’s active. Stop wasting time jumping from one tool to the next. Do it all on one workflow.

Why should i use it?

I’m an active blogger and i’m writing about different topics in technology. I like when people get knowledge about my posts and writings. And i like it when at least some of my posts will help other people solving their problems. With CoSchedule you’re able to get your posts not only just published on various social networks, but also keep it republished as you defined it.

But not only for single blogger like me CoSchedule is a great help. Imagine you and your team in your company. You’re creating content through workflows, with text, proofreading, imagery and so on. With CoSchedule you can easily collaborate on projects, assign tasks, add comments, and meet your project deadlines. With custom workflows your team stays accountable, and you get the sh*t done!

Overview / Features

CoSchedule as an easy to install plugin for your WordPress instance. Once registered you can start right away.

  • On the “Calendar” view you always see what’s done and what happens the next few days, weeks and months.
  • “My Activity” gets you more insights about your content and your tasks.
  • The “Analytics” pane shows you more details about your top content and the social engagement.
  • Get your team organized with on “My team” view. Invite your writers and authors, assign tasks and start your content with workflows.
  • If you don’t want to be logged in to WordPress the whole time, click on “Open in Web App” (and save this links to your favorites) to access all of the features above through one single web page.

To get a closer look i’ll provide you some more details. Because a picture is worth a thousand words.

CoSchedule is an editorial calendar for your blog and content marketing that keeps you insanely organized while saving you tons of time. To have a overview about all the features have a look at the video.

Ok, you got me! Where can i sign up?

Well, that’s pretty easy. Go to the CoSchedule website and click the “Try it free” button to sign up. You’ve got 14 days of trial where you can test all the features without limitations. Install the plugin on yur WordPress instance and start using CoSchedule directly. Get familiar with the functions and test the publishing features. You’ll love them!

Conclusion

Saving time and getting things organizied. That are the goals of CoSchedule. Build the perfect social schedule (directly in your calendar), keep your social and content in one place. I’m testing CoSchedule only since a few days. But the features keep what they promise. I was used to struggle from one tool to another, shorten links there, having analytics here. With CoSchedule you’ve got that all under one roof.

Blog infos – More hosting performance for the new year

by

In the history books of my website there are many written pages. Since the beginning of “blogging” (well, more technology testing and tasting at the past) my website moved around the globe. I started with a small hosting at Amazon AWS, with an EC2 compute instance, some storage and Cloudfrount CDN. That worked very well for me, but only for about a year or two. I then moved to another provider, one that is specialized in WordPress hosting. That pleased me very much because i like WordPress as a blogging software since i started with my website.

The guys at this new hoster moved all my content from Amazon to their hosting. And because they are Cloudflare partner, i came the first time in touch with greater scale website security, performance and content distribution networks, and that free of charge. Also this hosting went very well, but also just for about two years. It didn’t help the performance when the hoster is located in Canada and myself, and also most of my visitors, are located in Europe.

So there was another change in planning phase. I wanted to bring my content closer to my location and my readers. I decided to move my website back to a Swiss hoster. All the security and performance things i learned with Cloudflare i took with me, and my website was still under protection even at this new hoster. That worked well for me. But there were unfortunately some outtages i cannot explain. Sometimes my website was offline just some minutes, sometimes longer. I can’t explain why, we didn’t find out.

So again, i planned another move of my website, and again to a hoster which is specialized on WordPress hosting. I moved my website to Siteground.com. The guys there also moved all of my content to their servers, and helped my a lot with setting things up properly. And there were a lot of things i wanted, like SSL, redirects and many other things. We had a lot of support chat sessions, did a lot of testing and checks until my website was up and running. But the effort was worth it. My site now runs fine and stable. And if there is any issue, i just open a support ticket, and few minutes later my problem is even solved or they ask for more information via live chat.

Now my website runs at Siteground.com with a GoGeek plan which is crafted for WordPress geeks like me 😉

If you’d like to start also a new website hosting, or if you’re thinking about to move your existing website to another hoster, why not have a look here?

Web Hosting

Read more