• 5 Easy Steps to Having The Quickest Loading WordPress Site Ever

    Here it is:
    1. Find a VPS provider. At GOODHost we offer 512mb OpenVZ VPS for $37/year
    2. Open easyengine.io, follow their steps to install a wordpress site
    3. Or use my step. Type this on the command line:

    sudo ee site create yoursite.com --wpredis --   php7


    4. Migrate the contents from the old wordpress site to the new one, or starts anew.
    5. Enjoy

    Proof? Here’s the result of sucuri performance benchmark of this site, hosted on our LA VPS:


    You can test your own wordpress site performance on Sucuri Performance Benchmark

    And here’s a result of pingdom speed test from New York (the server is in LA):


    You can test your own wordpress site performance on Pingdom Speed Test

    Note that i didn’t use a CDN, nor i use any kinds of caching plugins.

    Also, as a bonus: If you need an SSL certificate to give your site an enhanced security & a boost in google rankings, you can use this command with easyengine:

    sudo ee site update yoursite.com --letsencrypt

    This setup is so much faster than the typical wordpress installation on a shared hosting environment, even without static caching.

    The installation steps that i use above basically told easyengine to create a wordpress site using PHP 7 (huge performance boost compared to PHP 5), and use Redis as object memory caching.

    Of course, with a VPS you’d need to know how to properly secure your server. But that’s a guide for another day, and i’m sure your VPS provider would be more than willing to give a hint or two.

  • Why Is There So Many Fake Web Hosting Reviews Online

    At GOODHost, we’ve recently started focusing on marketing ourselves better. To do this, I’ve tried looking into how people purchase their web hosting plans online.

    One of the biggest surprise i found is that there’s so many people who seem to get tricked by a bunch of review sites for hosting that’s neither objective, nor credible.

    Most of these review sites embed an affiliate link on every outgoing link to the web hosting provider they recommend.

    And guess what happens? All of the providers they recommend just incidentally turns out to be providers who pay their affiliates the most.

    As i considered myself quite active and ‘in the know’ about most web hosting companies they mentioned, it almost seem like a joke that they still recommend Blue Host, Hostgator, Site 5 and the likes. These are mostly companies who used to be good but then got acquired by the giant hosting company crusher and ruiner called EIG.

    I thought at first, well, these review sites look quite fake, i mean, just taking a gander at it for five seconds will show you their true motivation, which is for you to signed up and stay for at least 60 days so they can get their payday.

    But it turns out people actually fall for this. It’s pretty often i have people visiting the site, hit up the live chat and said, “Hostgator offers unlimited hosting, why don’t you?

    Then people who came to web hosting forum, mostly trying to get a recommendation on what hosting company is actually good, and then mentioned that they’re considering Hostgator. Or GoDaddy. Or Bluehost.

    It’s not in my nature to take a shit on providers, since i know there’s good people working there, and providing quality support is actually really hard, especially if you have that amount of customers.

    But these companies are just simply not good. At least after their acquisition. And they treat their employees badly. And they don’t care about the customers at all.

    So why do they still get the same amount of attention?

    Maybe the hosting industry, especially the shared hosting part of it, is just too oversaturated and the noise just push customers into picking providers that they heard the most often, but these review sites truly is another beast entirely. They illustrate and contribute to the scummiest part of this industry that i hate the most, which is marketing lies.

    There’s no unlimited hosting. There’s no unlimited bandwidth. There’s resource limits hidden in page 73 of their TOS, and if you go past the limit, your site will either be slowed down to hell, or they’ll tell you to upgrade. They’ll not help you optimize your site, they’ll just kick you to the curb.

    I don’t know the answer to solving this issue, but i know that people need to speak up more often and post reviews on providers they actually liked. I’ve seen some review sites try different methods and not use affiliate link at all, and i hope in the future they got more attention because this is just bad.

  • Why Is it So Hard for People to Update Their WordPress???

    From Sucuri:

    WordPress 4.7.2 was released two weeks ago, including a fix for a severe vulnerability in the WordPress REST API. We have been monitoring our WAF network and honeypots closely to see how and when the attackers would try to exploit this issue the wild.

    In less than 48 hours after the vulnerability was disclosed, we saw multiple public exploits being shared and posted online. With that information easily available, the internet-wide probing and exploit attempts began.

    I really don’t get it. The fact that modern CMS these days are so easy to attack has been known for so long, and yet i’m still seeing so many old wordpress, Joomla or Drupal in the wild. I can understand that updating also came with a risk of its own (mainly your site getting broken), but the headache of trying to fix a broken site is much much less than your data getting stolen or your blog becoming a terrorist organizations advertising banner overnight.

    Lowendbox seem to be one of the site affected by this exploit too.