It’s received wisdom in the web hosting world, that the standard progression of hosting goes like this: Shared Hosting -> VPS Hosting -> Dedicated Servers But is this always true? Is a VPS is always better than any and all shared hosting? In my opinion, no. There are situations where shared hosting is objectively better. […]
Fake Traffic In Google Analytics – Don’t Freak Out!
Last night when checking my analytics, I saw a massive spike in traffic compared to other days. Here’s a screenshot: Apparently, some bot is recording a non-existent page on my site “/trafficbot.live”. Now I’m no stranger to bot attacks. I have a number of tools to deal with these. I was surprised however, that my […]
Should You Use A .net Or A .org Domain For Your Website?
So you’ve decided to start a new website for your business. You’ve got the perfect name. But you’re wondering – what extension should you use? There are so many! And more are being added all the time. Should you go for something traditional, or make it flashy? Let’s take a look at some of the […]
Caching With Query Strings – A Good Idea?
Caching software allows you to configure your cache such that each time you use a query string, a separate cache is created for it. So you’ll have different caches for the following: style.css?v=1style.css?v=2etc… Personally, I set my cache configuration to “Ignore query strings” because it turns out to be much more efficient, and there are […]
Why I Don’t Use Two Factor Authentication
This is going to be a controversial opinion. I’ve written a lot about website security on NameHero, and best practices for both shared and VPS hosting. So you might think that one of the first things I do is to enable two-factor authentication or 2FA wherever I can. NameHero itself offers the ability to enable […]
Filtering Out “replytocom” Bots On WordPress
I’m always monitoring my traffic to see which requests are causing the most impact on my origin server. I’ve already shown how to protect your WordPress login page using firewall rules and the challenges of rate-limiting. But you need to be on a constant lookout to see what new vulnerabilities are being exploited. If you […]
What Can You Do To Improve Mobile Load Times?
With page speed about to become a ranking factor in May 2021, you need to figure out how to squeeze every last drop of speed out of your website. What’s more, desktop and mobile speeds are calculated differently. Here’s a screenshot of the Core Web Vitals section of my dashboard for my website: You can […]
The Challenges Of Rate Limiting For Websites
I got up today and saw this traffic spike for my site: Sometime this morning, my server was suddenly hit with a flood of demands that bypassed Cloudflare’s cache and hit my server at WP-Tweaks.com directly. Given that I cache all my pages, I was naturally curious to see what this spike was and whether […]
When Hosting Location Doesn’t Matter (And When it Does)
NameHero allows you to choose where to host your website – the US or Europe, with the datacenters being in the Netherlands for the latter. This is great if your visitors primarily come from one area or the other. You can host your server close to them so that they get fast response times from […]
Why There’s No Free Domain With All NameHero Plans
Right now, NameHero offers a free domain with all Turbo and Business cloud plans when purchased for 2 years or more. You’ll notice that the free domain doesn’t come with a “Starter” or “Plus” plan. Why is this? After all, there are plenty of low-cost hosts that give you a free domain on even starter […]