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Archive for the ‘Performance’ Category

Celebrating 10 Years

Filed under: E-Commerce,Email,Hosting,Performance,Security,This & That,Web Development — Art Zemon on November 1, 2011

Ten years ago, on November 1, 2001, Hen’s Teeth Network was born. The past decade has seen tremendous technological change and let me work with truly amazing people and companies. Take a trip down memory lane with me.

When I started Hen’s Teeth Network, I never imagined the broad range of clients with whom I would work. Fascinating clients: from jewelry to medical marijuana, from children’s books to adult products, from swaddling blankets to grief counseling, from wedding invitations to anger management, from spiritual to religious to political and back again, from stylin’ shoes to hiking trails to bicycling, from podcasts to public libraries, from airplanes to trains to cars, from women’s fashion to medical uniforms, from art galleries to theatrical stages, from rubber stamps to air conditioners, from coffee to lobster to health supplements, from fishing tackle to board games, from financial forecasting to transportation planning, from dating help to parenting help, from home schooling to college course materials, from natural birth classes to Halloween costumes, from one-person start-ups to multi-national corporations to governments. It never ceases to amaze me how complex and interesting every business is, when you take the time to look at it carefully and understand how one business person is differentiating him or herself from his or her competition.

Among HTN’s clients, computers and the web are tools, simply a means to an end. Our mission, from the very beginning, has been: We help our clients improve their businesses by turning the internet and the web into useful tools.

2001

Launching a business less than two months after 9/11 might not be considered stellar timing but it was the right thing at that point in my life. I offered my time way below a living wage but it is better to earn something than nothing and, in those days, full fare work was darned hard to come by. Our web hosting was done on machines in my basement and reliability depended on my constant, personal availability. (more…)

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August 2011 – Load Balancing

Filed under: Newsletters,Performance,This & That — Candy Zemon on August 25, 2011

[HTN News] Heavy Traffic

What Can You Do To Keep a Busy Site Responsive?

Would a Load Balancer Help?

After reading “load balancer,” you might be imagining a woman in a brightly colored gown walking down a sunlit street with an impossibly large wicker basket improbably balanced atop her head. Today, though, I want to tell you about a load balancer that you can use with your web site when it outgrows a single server. You might think that your site will never need more than one server but there are several scenarios in which it might. First, let’s talk about what a load balancer is and how it works. Then we will come back to the scenarios to talk about when load balancers can help you.

The people visiting your web site or, to be more precise, the computers which are requesting data from your web server, comprise a “load” on the server. Just as the grocery store has several check-out lanes, you might have several computers to handle the load. If you have several computers, you will also put a “load balancer” in front of them. The load balancer takes the traffic from the visitors and distributes it across the servers so as to optimize the performance of your site. The load balancer acts like the airport employee directing each traveler to the right security lane.
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Google Search Results Influenced by Site Speed

Filed under: Hosting,Performance — Art Zemon on April 12, 2010

You may want to pay more attention to how quickly pages load on your website. Google announced on Friday that it is using site speed in calculate search result ranking. Faster sites rank higher.

Performance tuning is a deep subject but a few obvious places to start are

  • PHP as an Apache module versus as a CGI script. Most shared hosting accounts run PHP as a CGI script. If speed is a driving factor for your site, look for a hosting account on which you can run PHP as an Apache module.
  • MySQL query cache. This is a huge performance gain for MySQL-based apps such as WordPress, Drupal, and many e-commerce engines. If MySQL response time is limiting the page load times for your site, get a hosting account where you can tune the MySQL query cache to meet your site’s specific requirements.
  • Local & fast MySQL. Many hosting companies make you use a MySQL database server that is relatively slow to reach and slow to respond. This makes any MySQL-based website run slowly. Consider moving to a hosting account which has the MySQL server on the same box as the rest of your application. (This point does not apply to huge sites which need multiple, physical servers.)
  • Sane site design. Pay attention to image sizes, over-use of server-side-includes, bloated code, etc.

Your hosting account makes a big difference in page loading speed. For many (most?) sites, RAM and bandwidth are the bottlenecks, not CPU. It can be hard to get a handle on those specs since many companies only market hosting accounts based on disk size and that does not have any correlation to performance. Talk to your hosting provider and see if a little more money can buy you a significant bump in performance.

Hen’s Teeth Network’s Cirrus Hosting accounts give you the ability to run PHP as an Apache module. All run MySQL locally, giving your site fast access to the database and giving you 100% control over the MySQL query cache configuration. See our earlier article, HTN Cloud Hosting 3x to 4x Faster, for a dramatic illustration of how much the hosting account impacts page load time.

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