Here is a list of the stuff you need to do on a monthly basis and how long each task might take you if you’re a non technical user.

1. WordPress (or other CMS) Updates

One of the most important, and at the same time most overlooked, maintenance tasks for any CMS. WordPress sites in particular have plugin or core CMS updates every few days due to the nature of the system. WordPress is very popular and used by a big percentage of the market, so things are constantly changing and security vulnerabilities are a common thing on such a popular platform.

WordPress comes with a built-in system to manage updates for WordPress core, plugins, and themes. You should always use the latest version of WordPress and keep all your plugins and themes updated. This is very important in order to maintain stability and a healthy and secure website.

With every update on every CMS there is a possibility that things will break, so its best to perform a backup before the update and if possible, perform the backup on a development or staging environment. This is more important if there is a major update to be done.

2. Check & Delete Spam Comments

There is a great deal of spam in the internet. Bots scan the internet and leave comments anywhere they can find a text input. Depending on the CMS system you have there are ways to combat that, for example WordPress has Akismet, other systems might have other ways to combat that.

Whatever the case might be, you always have to check and moderate every day in order to approve legitimate comments (if you have approval procedure in place) and delete spammy comments from the system in order to keep it clean.

Websites with lots of traffic and lots of articles can easily get hundreds of comments per day so this could be a tedious task for such a website.

3. Optimize Database

Database is one of the most important places of your website, since it stores all its data. Everything gets stored in a database, all your content, your settings, plugin data, everything.

It’s easy to understand that for a site that is constantly running, reading, saving and deleting stuff from the database things like caching, plugins and other CMS procedures, can be leave trash behind and clog the system.

Database can end up being very large and can slow down your whole website and of course increase your backup size considerably. An increased -with no reason- backup size means a not so fun process to restore as well and can result in other kind of corruptions and errors. We have seen databases that were 2GB and went to 350MB after optimization.

There are plugins to do this task, especially for WordPress, but since your database is crucial for your site you have to be careful and always do a backup first.

4. Run Performance Tests

Most of the time website admins and developers believe that performance is an one time task during the development of the website. Meanwhile you keep adding content, new plugins, change stuff on your theme etc. With all these tasks performance keeps changing as well.

Fast websites are also favored by Google so it’s very important that you constantly monitor performance and act whenever you see a change.

Performance optimization is an ongoing task and you should use tools like GTMetrix to test and monitor your website (you need the pro version to automatically monitor).

When reviewing performance don’t just do it for the homepage. Do it for the rest of the website as well, especially for pages that get lots of traffic. Optimize images, scripts, loading times and check if any new plugins created a bottleneck on your performance.

It’s a good idea to clear your caches when you are finished so your website cache is refreshed.

5. Test All Forms

Some CMS systems like WordPress make it extremely easy to create forms. But since the form involves sending out emails there are other factors at play for those emails to get delivered.

Server misconfiguration and email IP or domain reputation can stop emails from completed forms to be delivered. This is extremely hard to find out unless you test the forms of your website regularly.

So once every a couple of weeks go onto your website like a normal user (not logged in) and complete the forms and send them to yourself. If you have an e-commerce plugin such as WooCommerce, go ahead and place a test order to see if the ordering system works.

It is also a very good idea to add a plugin that saves form data to the database just in case. For WooCommerce keep a cheap test product (something like $0.20) in draft so you can enable and buy it, testing all payment methods.

6. Find & Fix Broken Links & 404 Errors

Whenever a user requests a page that doesn’t exist your CMS System, for example WordPress, will show them a 404 page. If the user mistyped the URL you don’t have to worry about it.

But if one of your pages has changed and for some reason the old URL is linked somewhere in your own website or in any other website your users will have a bad experience. They will most probably bounce off your website and Google isn’t going to like that.

You have to routinely check your website for error pages and also have some kind of logging to see if users come to non-existent URLs from outside sources, such as Google. You then have to fix those 404 pages by redirecting users to the correct page. WordPress has a plugin for that.

If you routinely add content to your website, like articles in your blog, you will soon realize that links that you might have added towards other related articles or website might no longer be valid. Some may have moved to new locations, while others may just disappear.

You need to check your website for broken links as part of your WordPress maintenance routine and fix those links. A good tool to check is SEMrush

7. Optimize Images

This is especially crucial if you have more than one editors adding content to the website. But even if you don’t, 90% of the time all new pictures you upload can be optimized.

Performance tests from step 4, can tell you if any of your new pages contain unoptimized images. WordPress themes and in article images can be careless about image sizes, while other CMSs like Drupal can be more easily fine tuned to produce the right image sizes each time.

If you use WordPress try a plugin like SmushIt to bulk resize and compress pictures in your website.

8. Review Security Logs

Security is one of the most crucial things for your website. It’s more dangerous than ever before since nowadays, hackers don’t just deface sites for fun.

Most of the time, when someone hacks and access the website will keep the backdoor open and use it for sending spam emails using your server, will steal users data, might try to infect visitors with malware or ransomware and many more.

That being said, security needs to be taken very seriously and if your CMS is WordPress, you should keep your eyes open. Because its popularity and ease of use has made it a great target for hackers.

You have to have a security plugin if you use WordPress and regularly check its logs. Make sure you have good working backups because if a website is infected 9 out of 10 times its preferable to just restore a healthy backup than to clean up the mess.

9. Content & SEO Audit

As long as you add content to your website, you need to also work on the SEO as well.

But even if you don’t update if often you should check your SERPs, Analytics & Search Console for errors, sudden changes etc, in order to identify potential problems and fix them.

Google Analytics shows you where your visitors are coming from and what they are doing on your website. This data allows you to discover content on your website where users are coming but maybe are not converting into customers or subscribers.

Google Search Console shows you Search Analytics which helps you find search keywords where your site appears in the results. You can sort it to show you keywords where your site can easily rank higher by updating those articles.

An experienced SEO consultant can work with this data and your website plugin, like Yoast if you’re using WordPress and optimize your content even more for better Google Search visibility. This task needs to be performed regularly because your SEO efforts from 3 months ago might not be enough, or even relevant today.

10. Manual Backup & Verification

Proper working backups should be the only thing that gives you peace of mind. Imagine not having a backup and something messes up the website (like a hack) and gets totally deleted. You have just lost everything if you haven’t got a backup.

You need to perform backups regularly and not rely entirely on your host for backups. Furthermore you need to test those backups once in a while by restoring them to a test or staging environment. Having a backup that you don’t know if it works when restored is like not really having a backup.

11. Add Internal Links to New Articles

This is not an essential housekeeping task, but it’s a smart one. While you’re tooling around your site, take a little time to add internal links to your website’s older blog posts and pages.

It’s important to include external (outbound) links to high-authority sites in your posts, but many bloggers disregard the value of internal links. Internal links are links to posts and pages on your own website.

I think we often link to older posts when we create a new one, but you can also link older posts to newer, relevant articles. This tactic can keep your content fresh for longer and also help get a SEO boost from older articles as well.

Conclusion

Everybody needs to have a fresh, fast and optimized website but it certainly takes time and some knowledge to do maintenance.

If we add up the average time you need for each task per month you need to book on your calendar approximately 28 hours.
That’s 3.5 working days out of your calendar each month, just for maintenance!

Our All Inclusive Plan covers all of the above for just €97 per month. What will 3.5 working days cost you?

We know that your time is valuable and you can probably earn a lot more by freeing up 3.5 days from your calendar while keeping your website performing at its best every single day. That’s why we created the All Inclusive Plan, to free up entrepreneurs and website owners from the tedious task of boring (and maybe dangerous) routine and maintenance tasks.

Whatever you choose, please don’t neglect your website!

The post 10 + 1 Website Maintenance Tasks. How Much Time Do You Need and How Often? appeared first on Fast Web Host. Literally.

What is going on?

“We now use SSD!” This phrase is everywhere nowadays, advertised hard by web hosting providers. But not all solid-state disks (SSD) are created equal.

The wrong SSD, or the wrong RAID setup, can be slow or entirely fail like any other disk. As is the case with other hardware, you don’t want to cheap out on your storage. Simply having an SSD in a server doesn’t ensure your sites will be faster or more reliable.

The challenge of reliable SSD Servers

The challenge of offering solid-state storage is getting both fast and reliable – and without (entirely) breaking the bank.

Web hosts are increasingly adopting SSD storage in their hosting infrastructures, but they do so with desktop-grade SSD. And desktop-grade SSDs, like desktop-grade SATA hard drives, fail too easily and too often.

Enterprise-grade SAS SSDs are still prohibitively expensive for most hosting providers. So before signing up with a new host, or “upgrading” to an SSD plan, find out what’s exactly is being used. Then research it, to see if it’s a quality enterprise-grade SSD. You don’t want to go with a provider that resorts to cheap failure-prone consumer SATA SSDs.

Golden Rule of Storage

Fast, cheap, reliable and you can ONLY pick two!

• Fast & Reliable, won’t be cheap
• Fast & Cheap, won’t be reliable
• Reliable & Cheap, won’t be fast

While desktop-grade SATA can suffice for certain types of storage servers, SSD technology is very erratic. The disks are faster, and cheaper, but tend to fail miserably within a short time if they’re under extreme load.

There’s simply no escaping the golden rule of storage!

Why enterprise-grade SSD drives are better

A quality enterprise-grade SSD is not only much faster than most consumer SATA SSD’s, but also feature up to 100x better lifetime reads and writes.

It’s an ideal storage for heavy mission-critical databases, and effectively removing any disk subsystem bottleneck and chance of unexpected data loss.

What SSD storage is Fast Web offering

Fast Web is only offering enterprise-grade SAS SSD storage in all of our hosting packages. These disks are 4X the cost of even high-end consumer-grade drives (And if you ever wonder why we can’t and don’t offer “unlimited” storage, this is why).

Looking for an SSD hosting solution with zero compromises? Go pick your fast web hosting package today!

The post Consumer or Enterprise SSD storage? What is the difference appeared first on Fast Web Host. Literally.

WordPress provides two configurable website URLs – WordPress address (also called SiteURL) and Site address (also called HomeURL). WordPress relies on these URLs to access your files and load the content correctly onto your website. Generally, the two addresses are filled out by default when you create a WordPress website. To change the URL of a WordPress website, you need to modify both the WordPress address and Site address URL.

There is a lot of confusion when it comes to understanding what WordPress address and Site address does, and why there are two addresses instead of one. In this article, we aim to demystify these URLs and give you an understanding of how to modify them.

So, what’s the difference between them?

The WordPress Address is where your admin pages are, along with all the other parts of WordPress, such as the folders “/wp-content/”, “/wp-include/” live. It is were the code or brains of your WordPress site reside.

The Site Address is the public-facing part of your site. It is the URL that visitors visit, and the URL you put on your business card.

Why are they sometimes different?

In a default WordPress installation, the two address are the same. But sometimes WordPress is in a different folder or directory than your public home page. Why? Here are a couple of the reasons why they may be different:

1) Your site has parts that are not WordPress based.
2) You want to keep your root directory free of WordPress folders and files.

If you currently have WordPress installed in your root folder, and want to move it to its own folder, the WordPress codex has instructions for that here: How to Give WordPress its own Directory.

The post What is difference between home URL and site URL appeared first on Fast Web Host. Literally.

Here’s an example:

$logMessage = 'A '.$user->type.' with e-mailaddress '.$user->email.' has performed '.$action.' on '.$subject.'.';

Wow, my fingers hurt… While typing the most time is spent on making sure the quotes are open and closed on the right places. It also isn’t very readable. Especially the .'.' at the end make my eyes bleed.

A better way to create the string is to use the sprintf-function. This example produces the same string as the code above:

$logMessage = sprintf('A %s with email %s has performed %s on %s.', $user->type, $user->email, $action, $subject);

That’s much better. This is much easier to type and you don’t have to pay attention to opening an closing quotes. But my eyes still need to do a lot of work. To find out which string goes in which %s-placeholder you have to switch watching the beginning and end of the line of code.

There is another option to concatenate strings. It uses curly braces. Let’s take a look:

$logMessage = "A {$user->type} with e-mailaddress {$user->email} has performed {$action} on {$subject}."

In my mind this is much better. This option has the least amount of characters to type. Your eyes can just read the line of code from left to right to understand what’s going on. Keep in mind that this only works when using the curly braces between a double quote. The first character after the opening curly braces should be a dollar-sign.

The curly braces syntax works well if you only need to concatenate strings. As mentioned in the comments below this post, <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.sprintf.php">sprintf</a> might be a better fit when concatenating some other type of variable.

The post Making string concatenation readable in PHP appeared first on Fast Web Host. Literally.

DNS, is an Internet service that translates domains names into IP addresses. For example, when you visit FastWeb.Host it must look up the corresponding IP address to that hostname behind the scenes. This query is performed by a Domain Name Server (DNS server) or servers nearby that have been assigned responsibility for that hostname. You can think of a DNS server as a phone book for the internet. A DNS server maintains a directory of domain names and translates them to IPs.

Why Reliable DNS Hosting is Important

With the rise of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks using a high-quality DNS hosting provider is very important to the redundancy, speed and even security of your website. There is nothing worse for visitors than your website being inaccessible. Therefore you need to choose a reliable DNS hosting provider.

Redundancy

If you are running a business, you should never have one single point of failure. Although DNS hosting providers allow you to configure secondary nameservers, you are then assuming that all of their services won’t be affected, ever. It is like storing a backup of your computer files on an external hard drive in your house. There could be a fire and all of the sudden you have lost both your computer and external hard drive, so all your files are now gone. Just as it is important to store backups offsite, it can also be beneficial to use multiple DNS providers.

A common approach is to configure one of the DNS providers as primary and the other as secondary, slaved to the primary provider. This means that your Zones records are synchronized from the primary to the secondary. For example, if a lookup fails and times out to your first DNS server it queries the next DNS server until the correct IP address is returned, or it is unable to resolve as seen in the infamous “This webpage is not available” error below.

Keep in mind that ISPs do cache DNS, which means if your first provider goes down it will still try to query the first DNS server for a period of time before querying for the second one. A quick way to fix this is simply by temporarily changing the TTL (time to live) setting for the DNS record, and route your traffic to the second DNS server until the outage is fixed.

In general practice, it is better to keep a longer TTL for DNS records because this means your ISP will have the DNS cached, and users might not even notice if your DNS provider goes down for a short period of time. For example, if your TTL record is set to a week on Monday, and your DNS provider is down from Monday night through Thursday, your users will not see any downtime due to your ISP caching the DNS.

Speed

Speed also plays a role with DNS. Using a fast DNS hosting provider ensures there is less latency between the DNS lookup and TTFB. You can test the DNS lookup time and TTFB with a website speed test tool.

Just like with content delivery networks, DNS hosting providers also have multiple POPs. In general, the more locations, the better as this means there will more likely be a DNS server closer to the visitor, decreasing the lookup time. But remember, ISPs also cache the DNS so by setting a longer TTL it means fewer queries to your DNS servers.

Security

According to a recent Akamai report DDoS attacks are getting more and more sophisticated, with advanced bots leading the way. Distributed Denial-of-Service, is a type of DOS attack in which it attempts to make a machine or network resource unavailable. DDoS attacks usually involve more than one-and often thousands-of unique IP addresses and often spoof DNS queries.

This is where having multiple DNS providers is vital. Read about what the Canopy.co team learned when a DDoS attack took out their DNS provider.

Some free DNS hosting providers are equipped with features such as firewall policies, rate limiting, filtering, and blocking that can help mitigate and prevent DDoS attacks. And of course having multiple DNS providers means that if one is taken down from a DDos attack you can always resort to your secondary.

10 Best Free DNS Hosting Providers for 2019

Here is a list of the top 10 free DNS hosting providers.

1. CloudFlare

CloudFlare powers more than 38% of the managed DNS domains on the web. And it also possesses one of the world’s biggest authoritative DNS networks.

Capable of delivering query results in few milliseconds, the company claims to be the fastest managed DNS provider now. They serve 86 billion queries in a day! Their servers can also make DNS updates live in just a few seconds!

CloudFlare is also one of the biggest free DNS hosting services available now!

Their free DNS service can offer much faster performance than its premium counterparts.

However, being a managed DNS host, you may not have as much control as other free DNS hosting providers. But they provide added security to your website thanks to their intuitive blocking, filtering, and rate limiting features.

2. Rackspace

Rackspace is free but only to its existing customers! Their current customers can use their DNS hosting and management at no cost. Even though with just 5 or 6 PoPs (Point-of-Presence), they have an impressive track record of uptimes.

Some of their main features include IP Anycast routing, automated migrations, flexible access, and load balancing. You can setup these features easily through their RESTful API and cloud control panel. They also have an easy-to-use interface.

Rackspace allows you to have total control of your DNS. You can do a variety of tasks like adding, modifying, removing domains, records and so on thanks to their API and Cloud Control Panel.

The fact that it’s only available their active customers is a downside to this service.

3. NS1

NS1 offer a solid and free DNS hosting service. In terms of speed, they outperform many of the top players in the industry. NS1 offers potent Filter Chain routing engine designed to easily manage highly critical and demanding applications on the web.

This powerful routing engine can also help you customize your DNS. But most importantly, this routing mechanism takes smart routing choices in real-time to make your applications faster and reliable.

NS1 also provides automatic traffic management by leveraging your infrastructure and real-time network data to ensure a high level of reliability and performance. If you want to tweak some code, no worries, their RESTful API is very user-friendly for programmers.

Their free tier offers 500k queries per month, 1 Filter Chain, 2 free monitoring jobs, 50 records and more.

4. Hurricane Electric Internet Services

Hurricane Electric Internet Services provide a 100% free DNS hosting service with strong connectivity all over the world. They have a solid network of DNS servers with more than 130 PoPs (Point-of-Presence) distributed across North America, Europe, and Asia and support IPv6 everywhere.

The company boasts more than 19000 BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) with more than 6000 varied networks. This signifies lower load time for your website and an overall better user experience.

5. ClouDNS

The free DNS hosting plan from ClouDNS is a service that you can try out with confidence. With servers spread out in North America, Australia, Asia, and Europe, CloudDNS employs a Round Robin (RR) architecture in their DNS network platform.

With their free tier you can add 3 domains with 4 DNS servers, 3 DNS zones, 3 Mail forwards, Dynamic DNS, support for native IPv6, round robin, and unlimited records or requests. However, they have reserved GeoDNS and DDoS protected DNS hosting to their premium members.

6. Free DNS

Processing more than 7 Billion monthly DNS requests, FreeDNS network has been providing great quality free DNS hosting since 2004. They offer absolutely free DNS, Static DNS, as well as Dynamic DNS services.

It may stun you beyond imagination but they really offer unlimited domains/account. With a long history of providing free DNS hosting services, FreeDNS is quick and easy to setup, exceptionally reliable, and fast. Most importantly, every update is made live on the internet – instantly!

7. GeoScaling

A smaller company that handles around 1 million DNS requests per month, GeoScaling offers a bunch of unique features in its managed DNS services. They have a low TTL (Time-To-Live), which means updated records are made live on the internet in less than 5 minutes.

GeoScaling’s DNS service supports a variety of normal record types including the Service Record (SRV). And they also offer support for Dynamic DNS, and allows you to import, upload, and paste BIND zone files.

If you happen to reside in France, Romania or Texas, you can avail their assured redundancy and scalability benefits. With an easy-to-use interface, you can add and update DNS records without reloading the web page. Any change is propagated to the nameservers instantaneously.

8. NameCheap

Namecheap is a famous domain registrar. But they do more than just domain registrations of course. One of the things they offer for free, is DNS hosting services with Dynamic DNS.

Namecheap has geographically dispersed name-servers that can boost your site’s performance and make it load faster. They also support almost every record type including SRV. They also have powerful and intuitive management console and offers 24/7 technical support to their customers. But you need to be a customer.

9. 1984

1984 is definitely one of those free DNS hosting providers that you should give it a shot. Their service also supports almost all normal record types including SRV and TLSA. Other features included in their free DNS service are Web Redirects, Dynamic DNS, and Nameserver on Anycast network.

In order to use 1984’s free DNS service, all you need to do is register a user on their home page. Their FreeDNS service offers total control over every domain you register with them. You can host your site anywhere and avail their DNS service for FREE!

10. BuddyNS

If you are looking only for a free secondary DNS service with an easy-to-use interface, then BuddyNS is just right for you! BuddyNS claims to be capable of updating your DNS data faster than any other DNS service providers. This speed is 10 to 100 times faster than the industry average! Their free tier gives you up to 300k queries per account.

With 8 geographically distributed PoPs, their service automatically syncs with the master DNS service in just a short period of 10 minutes. It can even sync it instantaneously using SyncNOW or NOTIFY feature. With a solid DNS infrastructure across the globe, BuddyNS can process your visitor queries much faster – irrespective of your visitors’ geographic location.

BuddyNS has also maintained a 100% uptime since its beginning. And the best part is that they also allow you to integrate CPanel/WHM. With a secure and perpetually available network infrastructure, BuddyNS servers keep your domains ever accessible to users even your primary DNS goes down.

With so many options out there it’s normal to ask yourself

Let’s look at the numbers

Who offers the best free DNS? Who has the least DNS lookup speed? Is free DNS hosting as good as paid DNS hosting? As you can see below a majority of the free DNS providers we mentioned above are competing neck and neck with the speeds of premium providers.

2019 DNS Speed Comparison Report from Solve DNS (both Free and Paid Services)

As you can see in the report NS1 really dominates the market in terms of speed with CloudFlare actually being 2nd from our list in terms of speed. Everything less than 10 milliseconds is great for DNS lookups especially for free ones!

If you look at last year reports or the year before that, you’ll notice that NS1 wasn’t always the fastest, that means they are committed in their service and continuously improve and invest in their platform. This brought them at the top of the list for now.

Final Notes

The availability of free DNS hosting services and providers is a great way to keep your costs low, something that will be very appealing in small – medium businesses who are on a tight budget.

Basically with CloudFlare (and others) offering so much even on their completely free plan means that if you ever have a need for a paid service, your company will be so big that you won’t even notice the cost… 😉

The post 10 Best Free DNS Hosting Providers for 2019 appeared first on Fast Web Host. Literally.