You probably heard someone talk about serverless technology around the office or at some conference conference your boss made you go and while understanding it’s merit as a technology doens’t come easy for a person without a technical background. With that said, I’d like to go over the biggest benefits of moving away from a traditional server and stepping into the cloud.

At its core, serverless is not the lack of servers but the existence of a server that does not need to be managed. Using microservices uploaded to Lambda that executes a little bit of code at a time and returning a value, you can build large-scale enterprise level application without having to see a single line of PHP. Now, this might not make everyone as happy as it does me but for a front-end developer like myself, that’s a godsend.

So why is this such a big deal?

It stands to reason that any new technology trying to challenge the old ways of creating, running and hosting web and mobile apps will have a tough time getting support, yet the serverless community has grown exponentially in the past year and the reasons behind the movement are clear.

• Lower costs
• Faster deployments
• Graceful scaling

How does this affect me and my store?

Well, there are a number of major upgrades that a serverless approach can bring to your store. Let’s start with the obvious. The cut in costs. Using a serverless technology is cheaper than your traditional hosting and if you ever hosted a Magento store (or basically any other self-hosted solution) you’ll know just how expensive running, even a semi-successful store can be.

For AWS Lambda, the monthly compute price is $0.00001667 per GB-s and the free tier provides 400,000 GB-s. The monthly request price is $0.20 per 1 million requests and the free tier provides 1M requests per month.

There are more and more companies sharing their stories on how the cut costs using serverless and if you want to you can read about how companies save money with serverless.

The second reason why going serverless can be of significant value is the unparalleled scaling that can be achieved with serverless. If you do any online shopping around the holidays, especially during the “Black Friday” sales you probably saw your fair share of stores that were down, crumbling under the weight of countless users trying to browse, add to cart or compare products.

Creating microservices for all your websites functionality will improve your page load speed, remove scalability concerns and making changes to your code or business logic will be far easier to implement.

How would this even work?

So how exactly would you go about switching your store from a traditional server and going serverless?
To make things easier for everyone to understand I’ll won’t get too technical as doing so will turn this article into a 15K words software documentation, and let’s face it. I’m not smart enough to pull that sort of thing off. What I will do is break the store into small sections and explain how I would tackle the situation.

1. The CMS

I’m referring to the static pages like homepage, contact page, about us, etc. For this section use a caching system to create static pages from the CMS and have them served from a cloud service provider like AWS or Microsoft Azure. Most e-commerce content management systems (CMS) already come with a half decent caching solution so you might already be familiar with the concept.

Personally, I’d go with Amazon EslastiCache. It’s easy to install and deploy and won’t break the bank.

Amazon ElastiCache offers fully managed Redis and Memcached. Seamlessly deploy, operate, and scale popular open source compatible in-memory data stores. Build data-intensive apps or improve the performance of your existing apps by retrieving data from high throughput and low latency in-memory data stores.
— Amazon ElasiCache

To keep this article short and sweat I’ll link[http://blog.e-zest.com/how-to-implement-aws-elasticache-in-magento/] to a tutorial on how you can integrate ElastiCache with Magento(as this is one of those platforms that just won’t work without proper caching).

2. The catalog

The catalog is the part with all the categories and products and the main issue you have with them is the rendering speed. Having thousands of products with filters applied will slow your website to a halt. Now imagine having 10, 100 or 1000 concurrent users browsing, filtering and comparing products.

The solution? Microservices!

Here is where AWS Lambda shines brightest. Every interaction that the user can have with the website is split into small functions. So having 10 people on your site or 1000 won’t make a dent in the page load time as AWS will scale to best fit your needs.

But wait, there’s more!

The best part of this approach is the fact that you only pay what you use. That’s right. No more paying for big server bills when your store gets no visitors. Here’s a neat little AWS pricing calculator to help you figure out what to expect in terms of cost.

Static files, like images and videos, can be served from S3 or even better: CloudFront to reduce costs and increase speed.

3. The cart

This is probably the subject that most people that stayed this far along in the article are interested in. Carts are extremely complicated and cumbersome systems that will eat that CPU as if it were made out of tacos. The problem with conventional stores is MySQL bottlenecks and when that happens you entire website stops responding until MySQL catches up(either that or the entire thing just goes down).

The fix is not that complicated. Stop using MySQL! Since you are already using AWS Lambda why not use DynamoDB, it’s easy to setup, cheap and reliable and before you start calling me a sellout for pushing AWS on you all, MongoDB is another solid option, in fact, I kind of prefer it to DynamoDB as I’m more used to using it. Here’s a quick guide on how to get started with Lambda and MongoDB.
Besides moving away from using MySQL, I’d urge anyone that gets a lot of orders to consider using an API like Magento’s API to handle orders. At the moment, having an expensive server with all the bells and whistle can withstand 3 to 5 orders/second which as it turns out, it’s still less than stores like Angry Birds store or Anki.com need.

The way it would work is as simple as it is efficient. You handle the order queue via a javascript based checkout system that interacts with the store API validating and recording each order. Here’s a tutorial on how to do this in Magento: https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.1/get-started/order-tutorial/order-intro.html

So what’s the problem?

Why isn’t anyone and everyone using this solution yet? There are a lot of people that already use this solution and it saves both time and a lot of money. So why are there still people not using this? One reason might be the fact that serverless is still a new technology. Not everyone feels comfortable with it yet and because it’s so new the tools needed for development are not popular enough. Take for example AWS Lambda debugging. It’s a basic need for every developer and yet Amazon doesn’t have a tool that provides all the support needed for development. So we end up looking for tools Like Thundra.io and Dashbird.io(amongst others).

In conclusion

Moving from a traditional self-hosted solution to the cloud will be a complex problem for store owners but at one point or another, they will find themselves having to face difficult decisions vis-a-vis their platform and scaling capabilities and going serverless can solve many problems.

I’m anxious to see what’s to come in the e-commerce space. Perhaps we’ll see our first in-the-cloud e-commerce solution. The sky’s the limit! (get it? cloud computing – sky? ok, I’ll stop).

Both as a web designer, and as a user of the internet, you know that a fast website is a good websiteSpeed of a website is something which you don’t notice, until it’s missing that is.

Then it becomes frustrating. A bad user experience. A reason for bouncing off a website never to return.

If you want visitors to enjoy their experience on your website, you don’t need to think only about the design of the website, but how fast the website performs for ALL of your users!

Because good design is only one part of a good user experience.

After website design, the speed of page-loading is one of the most important factors which contribute to the success of a website. Besides that, it’s also a ranking factor.

Why is speed so important?

The necessity of having a fast website is a factor has been studied time and time again.

A negative experience is created in the mind of the user who is perceiving a site as being slow. A site’s conversion rate is also affected very negatively by slow performing websites.

Have a look at the graph below by research firm Soasta

Loading time vs conversion rate study

As can be clearly seen from the graph above, as load time of a page increases, the conversion rate drops drastically. The best conversion rates actually happen when pages take less than 3 seconds to load. Unfortunately, very few websites are actually able to provide such a fast user experience.

Is your website one of these slow-loading sites? Are you killing conversions and are not even aware of it?

But there are solutions which can help boost your website’s speed.

What is a CDN?

The term CDN is an acronym which means content delivery network. That is a fancy way of saying, a network of servers which are optimized to deliver the content (of your website) in the most optimal way.

But how does this content delivery network provide benefits to my website and how does it make the website load faster?

The CDN’s network of servers is an infrastructure which is designed to handle the load of traffic of a website better than that of generic hosting services.

Most hosting services, especially the ones aimed at generic websites are geared at creating a stable but generic environment, at a low cost to both the hosting service and the client. These websites typically run on generic environments, such as Apache, PHP, MySQL and other stacks of popular hosting frameworks.

However, the environment has not been specifically optimized and tuned for website speed. Shared hosting services are typically quite slow, particularly in their initial response. The fact that each environment is hosting multiple websites simultaneously means that they suffer from a resource bottleneck problem. Essentially, each website is hosted on the same server as many others, they are “sharing” the same resources. But while the term used is sharing, in reality, they are competing for the same resources. To keep costs low, this sharing creates a situation where each request sent to a website has to wait before it can be served. (Incidentally, if you are looking for a good share host, check out this review of Inmotion hosting – we really don’t complain much here)

Have a look at the below. One of my websites, which is aimed primarily for ecommerce (dronesbuy.net) is hosted on a shared hosting environment, without a CDN.

Have a look at the following waterfall graph:

Load time without CDN

Can you see the waiting time above of 1.26 seconds?

This is the time it is taking for the server to start “working” on the request sent to it. Essentially, at this point, my website is queued up, competing for resources with other sites hosted on the same server as mine.

This is an implicit delay in created by using a shared website hosting service

Bear in mind, that this delay is before the server event starts to send any kind of content back to the user.

With a delay of 1.26 seconds, you can forget having a page-speed load time of less than 3 seconds.

This is a problem. So how do we go about solving this problem?

On the other hand, a CDN’s primary function is to make websites load fast. Their actual infrastructure setup is designed such that they help deliver a lightning fast website.

But how does a CDN actually speed up my site?

How a CDN speeds up your site

There are a few reasons why a website can load slowly:

1. the shared hosting server has a lot of websites (to keep the price cheap) and is thus overwhelmed. The response times are therefore slow.
2. Images and other large content of the are not optimized and take a lot of time to download.
3. The website has installed many different WordPress plugins which are generating many CSS and JS files and other resources
4. The hosting server is located geographically far away from the actual visitors of your website (think website hosted in the US, with readers mostly in Europe)

There are other reasons, but these are the main ones which generate the largest loading time hits.

You can take mitigating steps to fix each of the above-noted problems individually, but we’ll focus mostly on the last two in this article.

Your shared hosting is overwhelmed and slow

Shared hosting servers are by their definition – slow, especially if they are cheap. It’s just the economics of it.

When a hosting company rents or buys a server, they need to share that cost with their clients.

Put simply, and for the sake of example, if your server costs $100/month and you want to price your plan at $10/month, you need to host 10 accounts to break even.

If you want to price your plan at $5/month, you need to host 20 accounts to break even.

You get the gist. The cheaper the plan, the more the accounts you’ll need to host on the same server.

If a hosting service is advertising itself as cheap, and you want your website to be fast – run a mile!

So what happens, on shared servers, each time somebody visits your website, the server is (at the same time) handling the websites of all of the other users / accounts on that same server.  

With shared hosting, it can take more than a whole second to even start working on delivering your website’s contents.

You can clearly see that delay on the screenshot above.

VPS vs Shared hosting environment

If you want to make a website fast, this delay of one second in response time is creating a serious issue for you.

Here are our first recommendations

1. If your website is using WordPress as the CMS, choose from the best WordPress hosting companies, the ones with known good service and great reviews. Stay away from cheap hosts.
2. Going for the highest plan you can afford, a Virtual Private Server is a good balance between a (cheap but slow) shared hosting site and a dedicated server (fast but expensive). With a VPS, your site will have plenty of resources to deal with the load and respond within a few milliseconds, rather than a whole second.

The images of your site are not optimized

Images are one of the primary reasons why websites can be slow to load. 

It’s always great advice to use images in your articles. They help to create a break in large pieces of text. Images are also great for readability.

“An image is worth a thousand words” or so they say.

But images can also create problems.

Primarily, images which are not optimized for speed can have a serious negative effect on the loading time of a website.

It’s actually quite a laborious process to remember to save each file in a speed-friendly format, and compressing them to a size which is small enough but which does not lose any of the quality of the image.

Besides being labor-intensive, some people are simply not aware of the need to optimize images.

So what’s the solution to this problem? We need to find a method which will automatically optimize images.

Here’s where a CDN comes to the rescue. CDNs are designed to address this problem without requiring any manual intervention

This is because image optimization (including lossless compression) is typically a built-in feature of most CDNs

That means you don’t have to worry about the images. While you handle the design and creation of a website with awesome imagery, the Content Delivery Network will automatically compress and optimize the images.

The website is using a lot of scripts

This is another factor which has a bad effect on the speed of a website.

Almost all plugins which are installed on a website have an impact on the loading time of your website – each plugin adds more and more assets to the site, making it slower and slower.

Each plugin which is used to create a specific piece of functionality is also slowing down the site.

Some plugins create more JS files, CSS files, and other assets, so some are worse than others, but all of them have at least a bit of an effect. The fewer plugins you install – the better. This is a golden rule.

Each plugin also adds overhead in the form of requests.

Have a look at the following screenshot from a site which has not been optimized for speed. You can see that the performance scores are very slow, whilst the fully loaded time is horrendous.

Slow loading time due to many requests

Thankfully, there are ways to mitigate these problems:

1. Install as little plugins as possible on any website
2. Combine the files created by all the plugins into a few files only
3. Enable HTTPS and then HTTP/2 on your website for better overall loading times

Once again, a CDN can help with the combining the files into fewer files and delivering that content over HTTP2.

The CDN actually performs compression and minification of JS and CSS files; this makes the overall size of your site’s resources smaller and therefore, faster to load.

Setting up of HTTP/2 in also highly recommended. HTTP2 is something which is a whole topic of its own so we’ll recommend a couple of great articles on WebDesignerDepot and on CollectiveRay blog which we’ve already written.

HTTP/2 has been created specifically to make improvements in the loading time of websites. It is designed to address certain shortcomings which older technologies did not deal with.

CDN services typically can enable HTTP/2 on your website, simply through the flick of a switch. HTTP/2 requires that HTTPS has been enabled on your site. Once again, CDNs typically have built-in support to serve content over HTTPS. Thanks to the CDN, you can enable HTTPS without incurring the cost and complication which is associated with secure website certificates. A CDN is also able to improve the overhead associated with the SSL/TLS handshake (which is a heavy operation). This ensures that even with HTTPS enabled – the site incurs no overhead.

There’s still one problem which we haven’t addressed which can slow down the loading speed of your website.

What is it and how can we fix it?

The geographical location of your website server

There is one thing which can negatively your website’s loading speed, even after you’ve performed all sorts of speed optimizations mentioned above.

Have a look at the following diagram.

Hosting server location vs visitor location

This shows the typical time it takes for web data to travel from the one side of the Atlantic to the other. You can see that loading a website hosted on a different continent that your website is visiting from, is a problem. If your website is hosted in the continental US, any visitor outside of the US will experience this problem.

Of course, this applies all over the world. It can even happen within continents if the visitor is located far away from the hosting server.

The distance your website’s content has to travel has a direct (and negative) effect on how fast your website loads.

If your website has a localized audience, choose a good hosting service which is physically close to your target audience. If you are targeting users in New York, choose to host your website on a good server in New York.

However, what do you do if your website caters to an international audience?

You can’t choose a server which is located close to the visitors of your website.

However, there is a solution. As you might have guessed, the solution involves a CDN, because a CDN service specifically addresses this problem.

Let’s see an updated version of the previous diagram, this time we see how the loading time is affected if we use the services of a CDN such as Incapsula CDN, one of the largest players in the CDN industry.

Without CDN vs with CDN

Just like we discussed at the beginning of this article, a CDN service is designed to shorten the distance that content has to travel to reach the visitors of a website.

A CDN service is set up by creating a network of hundreds of servers in different locations in multiple countries and geographies. These servers, known as caching servers or edge servers, each contain a local copy of the images and files which your website needs serve.

When a user accesses your website, these files are served from the nearest physical to your visitor.

This reduces the problem of distance and makes a website much faster to load compared to if a website was not using a CDN.

Have a look the following diagram, which shows the geographical distribution of caching servers around the world – making it possible to always serve content from a location which is physically close to your visitor.

CDN global server map

How to set up a CDN for free

The great thing about CDN services is that they operate on a freemium model – typically they offer a free plan. This free plan provides the localized caching functionality we have shown above.

If your website grows beyond the limits of the free plan, you can then move to a higher plan which suits the needs of your website better.

The easiest way to implement a CDN does not even need a plugin, it’s done by what is knows as a reverse proxy.

This only requires you to perform some changes to the DNS settings of your domain. You’ll find exact guidance for most hosts from the CDN you will opt for, or you can ask for support from the CDN’s support staff.

You can see below how your website together will work together with the CDN to send content to visitors. The origin server is your website’s server.

CDN setup using proxy server

The CDN server actually receives the hit when a user visits your website. It then sends the request to your site, such that any necessary dynamic content is generated. Once it gets a response, the CDN sends the dynamic content and all static resources to the visitor.

This removes a lot of load from your hosting server – making your website load faster and able to handle much more visitors simultaneously.

Conclusion – are you ready to make your website faster?

As we’ve seen in this article, setting up a CDN can start from the very cheap price of free! Besides not having to spend anything, the loading speed of your website will be much-improved giving your site’s visitors a better user experience for your visitors.

If you’re looking to have a fast website, a CDN is a must.

Should You Make Your Own Website?

As a small business owner you know the importance of having a company website. It’s your gateway to the world and your primary method of getting your message out and new customers in. The question becomes, should you create your own site or hire a web designer?

As with virtually every other business decision, ultimately this one comes down to time and money. How much of either do you have to invest? Other important considerations include how much control you want, how creative you are, and how good you are at telling your own story and promoting your own product or service.

What You’ll Need

Whichever way you decide, you will need five things:

1. domain name,
2. company email account(s),
3. server to host your site,
4. web authoring software, and
5. ftp program to upload your site to the server.

Your domain name should be short, memorable, and relevant to who you are and what you do. In other words, a name that establishes your brand. For example, if your company name is “Acme Widgets,” the obvious domain name is acmewidgets.com. But if that name is already taken, what then? Well, what if you make your widgets out of a new plastic that’s stronger, cheaper, and more durable than the material out of which widgets have been made up to now? Then your domain name could be acmeplasticwidgets.com. It says exactly who you are and what you do.

If you want your site to be a completely do-it-yourself project, you’ll next need a server to host your site. If you don’t have your own server, that means finding and creating an account with a web hosting service. Look for one with a good uptime track record as well as sufficient bandwidth, provision for setting up multiple business email accounts, good customer service, and favorable customer reviews.

Then you’ll need to find web authoring software; i.e., a program in which to create and maintain your site. There are many good programs available and some of the free ones are remarkably robust. Desirable features include:

• user-friendly interface;
• templates for page design and theme;
• site and page views;
• e-commerce feature(s);
• asset management;
• full word processor-type functions like text, graphic and video insertion, copy/paste, and link creation and management;
• preview function;
• reliable publishing function; and
• tutorials and/or help features.

Even if your software has a built-in publishing function, you may prefer to buy a dedicated ftp (file transfer protocol) program. There are several reasonably-priced programs available that give you the ability to quickly and reliably transfer (upload) the site files saved on your hard drive to your server. Most if not all of them allow you to choose whether to upload your entire site or just the pages on which you have made changes since your last upload.

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, be aware that many companies offer package deals to help you make your own website. Some feature not only a website builder, but also a free domain name, site publishing, access to help and advice, and reasonably-priced hosting.

Pros and Cons

The foremost advantage of creating your own company website is that you have complete control. You know it reflects your company’s vision, values, and preferred communication style. Other advantages are cost-effectiveness and the ability to make changes and updates quickly. Lastly, you have the enormous pride and satisfaction of learning and mastering new skills and creating exactly what you want exactly how you want it.

The biggest negative is upfront time. No matter how user-friendly, there’s always a learning curve to discovering how to effectively use new software. In addition, it takes time and thought to properly organize all the information you want to include on your site and present it in a logical and consistent manner across pages. However, once you have your site structured the way you want it, maintaining and adding to it is a comparative breeze.

Since its launch in 2003, WordPress constantly grew and it evolved from a simple blogging platform into a powerful and yet accessible content management system. Nowadays, most entrepreneurs, artists, lifestyle bloggers, you name it, most of them start with WordPress. If you have time and a bit of knowledge, WordPress is the best way to start a blog. Of course, there are other popular platforms like Squarespace for those who want something more straight forward. The platform’s success comes however from the almost unlimited plugin database, plugins that are able to cover all the requirements and needs of a user, whether they want to blog, sell products, develop a business portal or create an online community. As a consequence, there are many companies that migrated their web pages to WordPress, contributing at the same time to the development of the platform and its continuing popularity growth. With plugins, however, comes higher load times and sometimes a decrease in traffic. Therefore, some websites owner will have to migrate their websites to other, better, more WordPress friendly hosting providers. Before we start talking about some of the best WordPress hosting providers out there, we need to clarify some basic things about this popular CMS.

Why is WordPress so popular?

Although WordPress started as a simple blogging platform, it soon evolved into a real content management system that became probably the most popular in the world. It is one of the most reliable and user friendly CMS’ that exists in present days. There’s no wonder why and how words like wordpresser, wordpressing or wordpressographer have been taken into common language by people worldwide.

The beauty of WordPress stands not only in its easiness of installation and tweaking capabilities but in its diverse community that has gathered around a simple and yet powerful concept. It’s a community that consumes and produces at the same time, giving us thousands and thousands of themes, plugins and other useful tweaks. We cannot talk about WordPress without its plugins which contributed mostly to the evolution from a blogging platform to a real and powerful content management system.

Plugins make the best of WordPress

Basically, plugins are modules that extend the functionalities of the platform. And although they are not a part of the WordPress system, without them the platform would have been nothing more than a blogging platform easy to use but with little usability as a website. If we were to compare WordPress with the human body, we would say that the content management system is the brain while the plugins represent the heart which keeps pumping blood to the head. It is said though, that too many plugins slow down the site and lower performances, but in reality, it is not the number of plugins that has to be taken into account, but the quality of the coding and their compatibility with the WordPress version in use.

Steps to take before migrating a WordPress site to another hosting service

Apart from the plugins used, there is a number of reasons why to migrate to a new hosting provider. The load time is important but at the same time, it is important to have a good uptime, 24/7 technical support and a consistent bandwidth.

Before starting the migration, you need to make backups. If you’re on a CPanel supporting hosting, this task is quite simple, as CPanel has a built-in app that can create a full files and databases backup to be saved on the main ftp account. Of course, if you are not skilled in these types of tasks, there are always some plugins available to help you backup and migrate as easy as it gets.

Plugins that are useful for WordPress migration

We’ve already talked about the power of WordPress plugins and their importance in developing the community and making this blogging platform a viable CMS suitable for any kind of business. There are of course several plugins that can help you migrate to a new hosting provider and these are the three most accessible and easy to use of them:

1. Duplicator: (https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/ ) A flexible and versatile plugin, duplicator allows you to safely backup and migrate the WordPress website by duplicating its content.
2. WP Migrate DB:  (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-migrate-db/ )This plugin focuses on migrating the WordPress database, the most troublesome thing website owners have to deal with when trying to backup a website and reinstall it on a new server.  It makes a good choice because it simplifies the process of finding and replacing URLs and file paths. If you migrate to the same URL, then you have nothing to worry about but if you are changing the domain name, you can find it difficult to make all the changes needed in order to successfully migrate your website. This plugin takes charge of everything related to these issues and quite comfortably, solves them for you.
3. All-in-One WP Migration: (https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-migration/) This is a free plugin that can be enhanced with premium extensions which does exactly what its name sais: it helps the user migrate a website to a new hosting service. In some cases it might be better than the previous ones because it has the ability to bypass server upload/download restrictions by exporting and importing files in 3 second time chunks.

Hosting services to migrate your website to

Choosing the best web hosting for WordPress depends solely on your needs. There are a few WordPress provider out there and you can find the biggest ones below.

1. Hostgator. It’s the most popular hosting provider for both, individual users and business owners. They host over 8 million domains and offer 1-click WordPress
2. Bluehost. This provider has been around for years. It is known to be a bit more pricey but overall reliable.
3. DreamHost. DreamHost has been around for 18 years and is known for making web hosting easy. DreamHost powers over 600,000 WordPress blogs and websites. There are no setup fees, and you also get a free domain.
4. LCN – LCN offers tailor-made solutions for WordPress blogs. From your WordPress hosting to custom templates, they have everything to get you started or migrate from a different provider.

Conclusion

Migrating your WordPress website shouldn’t be very difficult if you have a tiny bit of WordPress knowledge. And when it comes to hosting, you will just have to choose the one that works for you the best.
Have something to add to this article? Let us know in the comments below.

Bonus: Check out this article about the best Business WordPress Themes.

If you are a designer, your core job is to focus on designing websites for your clients and handing over the complete, hosted website, to the user. It is not your job to manage the server nor is it your responsibility to get tangled in the intricacies of hosting websites. So who should you trust in such circumstances? It is simple: A Managed Cloud Hosting Platform.

With that said, finding a good Cloud Hosting Platform service is not easy anymore. Cloud Hosting is gaining great popularity day by day, and every other hosting firm is taking part in this Cloud Hosting business.

As there are numerous options available in the market, designers, and designing agencies hesitate to experiment with new Cloud Hosting Platforms. Professional people are not really into moving their application to another service because no one wants to risk their work and data.

In spite of all these practices, I thought out of the box and experimented with a managed cloud hosting platform about which I had heard a lot from some people. Apart from the word-of-mouth, I also read reviews of this platform. It is a relatively new service, based in Barcelona; it is known as Cloudways. However, once on board, I did not feel the service is new as the service was professional and seems like they know what they are doing. I am sure, as a design agency, you will be wondering how my experience with Cloudways was? To answer this question, let’s get to know about Cloudways in detail.

Launch Your First Cloud Server

By going through Cloudways blog and reading all the reviews regarding Cloudways, I was more than convinced that this managed cloud hosting platform should be given a chance. To make things better, Cloudways offers a free trial period of up to fourteen days. I feel these are more than enough to test out the platform and experience the offered services.

The process was simple; I just had to provide an email and choose a password to sign into Cloudways. After signing in, the process of launching a server and choosing an application is smooth as well.

Choosing an Application

Cloudways offers more than twelve applications on their platform, and all of them are deployable in one click. These applications include WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, PHP stack, and other prominent web applications.

As I was working on a WordPress website, I chose WordPress for this particular instance.

Give Your App a Name

After you are done with choosing your application, you have to give a name to your app, server, and project folder. Don’t worry; you can rename all these parameters later as well.

Pick Your Cloud Infrastructure

Cloudways is managed cloud platform that lets you host on different popular cloud infrastructures. Currently, Cloudways offers five market-leading cloud server infrastructure providers:

For the purpose of this review, I chose DigitalOcean as it offers a trial period of 14 days and because it is the fastest growing cloud hosting provider.

Give Your Server Some Space and Speed

Scaling your server was never this easy. Just slide the bar and scale up your server in a second. Moreover, you don’t have to worry about the wrong size of your server because you can always add more space to your server and other performance functionalities later too.

Pro Tip: Cloudways also offer an auto-scalable cloud infrastructure in the form of Kyup. This basically takes away all your worries related to your server’s traffic or a sudden influx of traffic.

For starting, I would recommend you to choose a minimum of 1GB server size. Why? Because with the 1GB plan, you you would be able to gauge the whole service in full throttle, including the support. It is a win-win situation as it is a Free Trial and you are not charged.

Select Your Server’s Location

Decide upon your target audience and choose your server’s location carefully as your server should be located nearest to your target audience. Currently, Cloudways offers eight locations for DigitalOcean.

You Are Ready to Launch

Click on launch button and wait for 7 to 10 mins. Cloudways will now set up your server by optimizing and configuring it accordingly.

That was like a walk in the park. It was simple, crisp, and minimal effort was required. From a designer’s perspective, I feel relaxed that I didn’t have to go through the hassles of a complex UI just to launch a server.

When launched, the following screen appears. By the looks of it, the Platform looks appealing and user-friendly. Let’s dive in a bit into the functions the Platform offers.

Too much to grasp? Here is a video to get you started with the Cloudways Platform.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwNo8u9MqLA&w=560&h=315]

Server’s Dashboard

The trip to Cloudways does not end here as there is a whole dashboard for doing different tweaks and tips to your server. The dashboard is user-friendly, so you don’t have to worry if you are an IT professional or a learning beginner. Each function of the server is located separately on your left, and all the main tabs are placed on the top.

This orderly placement of options makes it easy for a user to locate what function he wants to work on.

Server Management

Server Management takes care of all your needs regarding server modification. All primary functional related options are included in this tab. Some of the distinctive features are Master Credentials, Settings, and Packages, Security, Vertical Scaling, Backups, etc.

Master Credentials

Master Credentials is a tab containing all the confidential information you need to access your server and application. These credentials include access details of your SSH, SFTP keys, public IP, Username, and Password. It also includes an SSH Terminal which is launched through the browser. However, if you are not familiar with all these, you need not get your hands dirty.

Security

Keeping all the servers behind a sophisticated firewall, Cloudways cares more for your security. Its security features include Free SSL Certificates by Let’s Encrypt and adding more value to its security; Cloudways has HTTP/2 enabled on its platform which means all your data is secure behind complex protocols that aren’t easy to breach.

Backup

Backup is an exciting feature offered by Cloudways. You can always save backups of your server on daily, weekly, and monthly basis by setting up the backup frequency and backup retention rate. Moreover, by enabling a local backup feature, you can always create the latest backup of your application.

Application Management

Cloudways takes care of your server and application needs separately. Application Management tab deals with all settings regarding your chosen application. Various offerings of Application Management tab includes Access Detail, SSL Certificate, Deployment via Git, Migrator tools, etc.

Access Detail

This tab includes all the necessary information used to interact with your application plus it also has access to Cloudways database manager. Other information includes credentials of SSH/SFTP and admin panel. You can use this tab to access your WordPress admin panel.

Deployment via Git

Git is like an open arena for developers where they can share, experiment and experience their code. Since Cloudways wants you to share and experience your work globally, its platform supports code deployment through Git. You just have to generate SSH keys and put your desired version over the cloud.

Migrator Tools

In case if you are already thinking of moving to Cloudways, but are scared of migrating your WordPress, then you can always opt for their automated WordPress migrator tool. You can always migrate your application without any second thought because their team of engineers will look after your application from the start till the end, avoiding any malfunction. Oh, by the way, if you are using any other application, your first migration is free.

Pricing Plans

Pricing is one of the main concerns among most of the people and keeping this fact alive; Cloudways has pricing plans that caters to every audience. Their pricing plans start from $7 per month. Notably, I chose their plan of $17 per month which offers 1GB of RAM, 1 Core processor, 30GB of storage with 2TB of bandwidth. What is important to note here is that they are based on the Pay As You Go method, meaning, you only pay for the amount of server resources you use.

24x7x365 Support

Another major feature for Cloudways that caught my eye is their live chat support that is always there to guide you if you are stuck at some point. Moreover, they have their always updated knowledge base that is filled with simple, image-rich, tutorials that make it easier for a beginner to get accustomed to the operations of the Platform.

Ready to Fly?

Now that you know all about Cloudways and their lucrative offerings, I would recommend this amazing Cloud hosting platform to all designers regardless of whether they are professionals or beginners. Why? Here is a quick (brief) recap of what they offer:

• User-friendly Platform with quick access to all your applications
• 24x7x365 Support
• 999% Uptime Guarantee
• 50% reduction in page load times owing to ThunderStack caching recipe
• 1-click operations for multiple server and application functions
• Real-time monitoring of 15+ server performance metrics
• HTTP/2 support with improved Varnish UI for better security and performance
• Above average Affiliate program payout that pays on each conversion

However, there are few pointers to note that Cloudways lacks upon:

• Many providers give the option of Domains within their panels. Cloudways does not, which makes it a hassle to register a domain from other providers and then point to Cloudways.
• They have 24x7x365 online support. However, there is no option of a telephone support. There are some instances when you can get things done over the phone, instead of waiting in the queue to get your query resolved.

These are only some of the cons I found while exploring Cloudways. The rest of the features are all good, and up to date, including an innovational managed cloud hosting chatbot, CloudwaysBot, that notifies about server updates on preferred notification channels.

I signed up for their trial period and so can you to experience all the awesomeness. Give this platform a shot and let me know your opinion about their service.

Page load speed is a very important factor when it comes to the overall success of a business’s website or blog. And it is something that should not be taken lightly. It can affect almost everything; from your conversions, SEO and rankings, time on your site, bounce rate, and the entire user experience. If you dip in all of those areas, this could easily result in loss of revenue and customers. Today we will explore just how much page speed is impacted by certain web hosts and why you might want to reconsider using a cheap shared host.

Speed is a Ranking Factor

Google announced way back in 2010 that page load speed is a ranking factor. What that means is that sites with a faster page load speed could in turn rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). In Google’s Site Performance for Webmasters video, Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye, states that “two seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half-second.”

And fast forward to today and we now have Google launching the mobile-first index. This means that the ranking factor is also heavily looking at mobile optimization. You can almost guarantee that whatever weight they placed on the speed ranking factor before that it will be increasing. So you need to ensure that you have a fast responsive loading site, along with possibly an AMP implementation.

You can use free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom to test your website’s page load speed. They will inform you how fast your website is and offer suggestions on how to improve it, such as leveraging browser caching or minimizing redirects.

Page Load Speed Can Affect Conversions

A  slow page load speed can also affect your conversions and sales. For an e-commerce site, the last thing you need is to be losing revenue simply because your website is too slow. According to research from Kissmetrics,

“A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.”

Example: Let’s say your website loads in 3 seconds, and you have a product that sells for $200. On average you have 1000 conversions per week, equalling $200,000 in total sales. If you were to migrate to a faster web host and bring the page load speed down to 2 seconds, at 7%, that means you could potentially increase your weekly profits by over $14,000 a week!

Kyle Rush from the 2011 Obama for America campaign site showed through A/B testing that a 3-second page time reduction (from 5 seconds to 2 seconds) improved donations by 14%, resulting in an increase of over $34 million in contributions.

There have been countless studies proving that speed does affect your conversion rates.

Time On Site / Dwell Time

In Google Analytics, average time on site is a type of visitor report that provides data on the amount of time (in minutes or seconds) visitors have spent on your website. This is sometimes also referred to as “average session duration” or “dwell time.” The higher this number, generally the better.

A couple ways to keep your time on site higher is to write better and more engaging content that will keep the visitor on your site. Another way to structure your site in an organized fashion so people kind find what they are looking for. But speed is definitely a huge factor in average time on site as well. If a visitor gets frustrated with how fast it is to navigate your site they will most likely leave immediately. Ensure not only your homepage is fast, but your entire site.

Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page). According to another study by Kissmetrics, a whopping 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load!

Here are some typical bounce rate averages according to types of content and industries:

• 40-60% Content websites
• 30-50% Lead generation sites
• 70-98% Blogs
• 20-40% Retail sites
• 10-30% Service sites
• 70-90% Landing pages

One of the easiest ways to keep people from hitting that back button in their browser is to simply ensure that it loads fast! This can include even diving into more advanced optimization methods such as improving your TTFB and initial HTTP request. A content delivery network (CDN) is a great way to improve TTFB as it will help cache your static assets closer to the visitor. But one of the primary factors in this is the configuration of your web host’s servers.

How Premium Hosts Stack Up Against Shared Hosts

There are countless ways to improve page load speed on your website, such as:

1. Using a CDN to cache content closer to the user
2. Improving TTFB
3. Optimizing images
4. Lazy loading content
5. Caching
6. Being smart with web fonts
7. Optimize CSS code and delivery

But the number one factor that is going to drive the overall load times of your pages down is choosing a fast web hosting provider. And to be honest, it is one of the easiest. While it is great to save money, hosting is one area in which you should be very careful as choosing a bad provider could actually affect your revenue going forward. We recommend looking at hosting as an investment in your business/website and therefore skip the shared hosting route and go for a premium or managed host. You will be much happier in the long run.

Premium web hosts typically use a much faster technology stack based on the latest and greatest in the industry. Some things for 2017 that you will want to make sure they have are PHP 7 or HHVM, NGINX, MariaDB, HTTP/2, and premium DNS options. This combination has been shown to be very fast when it comes to loading any type of website, from a static site, to Drupal, and of course WordPress.

Speed Tests

To show you just how much web hosts differ when it comes to performance, we decided to run a few tests. Here is a comparison of Kinsta, a high-performance managed WordPress host, vs a 3rd party shared host. Both are configured in the exact same way and are approximately the same distance from Pingdom’s testing server.

Kinsta Speed Test

We did a fresh install of WordPress on Kinsta, nothing is configured other than SSL. It is running the default 2016 theme. We ran 5 speed tests on Pingdom and took the average. As you can see the fresh install clocked in at 386 ms, which according to Pingdom is 98% faster than all other tested sites.

3rd Party Speed Test on Shared Host

We then replicated the exact same setup on a 3rd party shared host. We did a fresh install of WordPress and configured SSL. It was also setup with the default 2016 theme. We then ran 5-speed tests on Pingdom and took the average. As you can see the fresh install clocked in at 1.00 second.

So in this scenario the premium host, Kinsta, had 61.4% faster page load speeds! Why is there such a large difference? Here are a few reasons:

NGINX

Kinsta uses NGINX whereas the 3rd party shared host was using Apache. NGINX has been proven to be lightweight and fast. Chris Lea said, “Apache is like Microsoft Word. It has a million options but you only need six. NGINX does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.”

Here is a quick look at the top million busiest websites (see below). As you can see in the trending graph, Apache is losing market share while NGINX is rapidly growing. Large websites like upwork, themeforest, wordpress.org, quora.com, and dropbox all use NGINX.

Img src: NGINX vs Apache

Server-Level Caching

Kinsta, like many premium WordPress hosts, use server-level full page and object caching to deliver pages lightning fast. The shared host we were using had no such technology in place. We could fiddle with caching plugins but then you should be looking at time involved hassling with this. With premium hosts it is a lot easier to just install and go! Joe from Human Made did a great comparison of the Batcache caching plugin vs Varnish, a server-level caching approach. As you can see under heavy loads server-level caching won by a mile!

Premium DNS

Kinsta had Amazon Route 53, which is a premium DNS provider. The shared host was simply using their free included DNS. DNS works like a phonebook for the internet, as it is a mapping of your domain to an IP address. There are slower and faster DNS providers out there. Amazon of course is one of the faster ones since they have an enormous infrastructure and network. Faster DNS lookup times can further increase the speed of your site.

And don’t forget DNS Doomsday, besides performance, a premium DNS provider is also important when it comes to reliability and uptime for your site.

HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is a new protocol designed to speed up connections with better multiplexing, parallelism, HPACK compression with Huffman encoding, the ALPN extension, and server push. Because of browser support, SSL/TLS is required to utilize HTTP/2.

The performance of HTTP/2 is a lot better than that of HTTP/1.1. For example, with server push capability HTTP/2 allows servers to respond with a page’s full contents other than the information in the browser’s cache. Efficient compression of HTTP header files minimizes protocol overhead to improve performance with each browser request and server response.

In our tests above, Kinsta was utilizing HTTP/2 on their servers which the shared hosting provider was not. You can easily see this by checking the header requests in Chrome Devtools network panel (as seen below).

HTTP/2 Supported (Kinsta)

HTTP/2 Not Supported – Still Running over HTTP/1.1 (Shared host)

HTTP/2 is simply a must now for secure connections!

Overcrowding Issue

Another issue with shared hosting is that they overcrowd their servers. Typically shared hosts don’t make any money on actual hosting customers, due to the overhead of support. For example, the shared hosting plan being tested above only cost us $10 a year!

They make most of their revenue on upsells and 3rd party add-ons such as domain registrations, SSL certificates, etc. Due to the fact they have very low margins they will tend to put as many customers on the same servers as they can until it starts to slow down. You can guarantee that at some point your site will be affected. And unless you have a performance monitoring tool running you will never know at what time it happens.

With premium hosts they normally go a different route. For example, with Kinsta above, they use Linux containers (LXC), and LXD to orchestrate them, on top of Google Cloud Platform which enables them to completely isolate each WordPress site. This is much more secure and when it comes to performance the Google Compute engines allow them to sale the sites automatically. The overcrowding and scaling issue is simply not an issue at all.

Summary

As you can see, page load speed is super important, as it can affect everything from your SEO, time on site, bounce rate, and conversions. Choosing a premium or managed hosting provider can be one of the smartest decisions you make for your business or blog; as it plays one of the biggest roles in improving your page load speeds. The old saying “You get what you pay for…” comes into play here. Think of hosting as an investment and choose wisely, as they greatly differ in terms of performance and technologies being offered.

Web development and maintenance can be the most annoying thing sometimes. Even for tedious small tasks, there are so many things that can go wrong and so many variables that you haven’t thought of, it’s just a huge hassle. Which brings me to Plesk.

Plesk is an ever-evolving platform that makes server management easy for anyone.

If you’re a web developer or a web designer, chances are, you probably heard of Plesk before. Afterall, Plesk is a leading control panel in the US that also captures roughly 75 to 80 percent of the European market. However, if you didn’t know about them, here is a little rundown of what Plesk does.

Plesk is a great developing tool for IT professionals.
The platform enables you to ease most of the daily tasks in website administration, even if you are managing a huge number of sites created with different apps and technologies. From building, securing, and running Plesk is your ally. You can build your website or application in a ready-to-code environment with an intuitive interface. The platform secures your applications and websites automatically and automates all server related tasks and components to run and scale your web applications and websites.
Basically, Plesk is the only tool you’ll ever need to build, secure and run websites and applications in the Cloud. For about 10$ a month you get 30 domains, WordPress toolkit, a developer pack, subscription management and account management.
Okay, that all sounds great, but how is that different from every other competitor out there, you might ask.
Well, the company recently launched the new Plesk Onyx, and everybody loves it. The new platform is all about speed and automation. Plesk Onyx isn’t just another sysadmin tool, it became a fully functional WebOps solution for web professionals.  

For a more practical approach, here is a list of the most important features that you can find only on Plesk Onyx.

1. Features and user experience parity on 14 Linux Distributions (including Ubuntu) and 4 Windows Server Versions.
2. Certification to run on major virtualization & container platforms as well as the largest cloud players such as Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure.  
3. Full support for Docker containers management, Git (including through GitHub and Bitbucket) focused on a complete continuous delivery workflow.
4. Interface templates that will majorly simplify the lives of developers and administrators
5. As a WordPress hosting customers you can handle your entire security management with a single click. Plesk will then manage plugin updates, bug fixes, and security patches for you.
6. Specific tools for scalable WordPress hosting and mass-management through an advanced Toolkit (and soon for other applications)
7. Broadest levels of supported server security tools – build in the core and additionally through 3rd parties (OS, Network, Application, Website)
8. The largest ecosystem & 3rd party marketplace in the area of web professionals and cloud based hosting
9. The most advanced backup features on server, reseller, customer and site level what no other such platform can provide.

Conclusion

Plesk Onyx is the only platform out there that works for web developer and designers both not just on sysadmins. The new Plesk Onyx represents a significant leap forward in functionality and user friendliness.
You can give it a try by signing up here.