Can anyone speak to the pros and cons of installing mod_expire on an Apache server?
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We recently had mod_deflate and mod_expire installed on our server in an attempt to improve pagespeed. They worked beautifully, at least we thought they did.
Google's pagespeed insights tools evaluated our homepage at 65 before the install and 90 after...major improvement.
However, we seem to be experiencing very slow load on our product pages.
There is a feeling (not based on any quantifiable data) that mod_expire is actually slowing down our page load, particularly for visitors who do not have the page cached (which would probably be most visitors).
Here are some pages to look at with their corresponding score from the Pagespeed Insights tool:
Live Sound - 91 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/live-sound-live-audioWireless Microphones - 90 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/microphones
Truss and Rigging - 79 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/lighting-truss
light weight product detail page 83 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/global-truss-sq-4109-12-truss-segment
heavy weight product detail page 77 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/presonus-studiolive-16-4-2
Any thoughts from my fellow Mozzers would be greatly appreciated!
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Hi Diana,
I would move your site to a host that supports Nginx it is light-years ahead of Apache and will save you a lot of head aches there are also many good web host that offer lightspeed In place of Apache is approximately nine times faster and is a much safer server as well.
I know you asked about Apache and normal and I would never give an answer that is kind of far off from the question. However I do believe that using lightspeed or Nginx will help you out dramatically
http://builtwith.com/ccisolutions.com
Some comparisons are very striking.
http://www.wheretohost.net/news/tutorial-nginx-hosting-and-wordpress-optimizations-on-dreamhost-vps/
Fire host is my go to four websites that are built on any framework and they offer both lightspeed and nginx
http://www.firehost.com/secure-cloud/nginx
https://www.engineyard.com/ is good
Here's even a shared version for six dollars a month
Apparently dream host now offers a VPS
Liquid web has good prices on this type of server I think you really won't build to be rack space or Amazon for price. I would go with rack space if I were you just because you get the added service however engine Yard is not too far off nor is VPS.net
VPS.net offers lightspeed
Rack space and Amazon offer Nginx
Single hop has a very good price on nginx
http://www.a2hosting.com/nginx-hosting
Here are some great stats
echnical Information
- Protocols and Performance
- HTTP/1.1, HTTPS, SPDY, WebSocket, IPv4, IPv6
- 1 million concurrent connections, 100K+ req/s per server
- 100K+ virtual server multi-tenancy
- Connection multiplexing pools
- Application Request Routing
- HTTP, FastCGI, SCGI, uwsgi, memcached
- Exact, prefix, regex based URI path switching
- Load balancing with session persistence
- Application health monitoring
- SSL Termination
- TLSv1.1/TLSv1.2/SSL/SNI
- OCSP Stapling
- Edge Cache
- Content offload and caching
- On-the-fly content compression and optimization
- HTTP video streaming with MP4/FLV/HDS/HLS
- Security
- Bandwidth, connection and request policing
- Protocol isolation and request filtering
- Header manipulation
- High Availability
- Active-Active, Active-Standby
- Live reconfiguration with non-stop request processing
- Live binary upgrades
- Supported OS and Architectures
- Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE, SmartOS, Amazon Linux, *BSD
- x86_64, i386, ARM
- Protocols and Performance
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Another reason to look at it. Is this
This month, market leader Apache lost 9.9M sites, or 3 percentage points of market share. A major contributor to this loss was the movement of a large affiliate referral network consisting of around 8M sites now being served by nginx. Apache is now used by just over 51% of websites, which is still substantially more than its closest competitor Microsoft IIS. IIS gained 1.95 percentage points of market share this month (an increase of 15.8M hostnames) bringing its market share to almost 20%. Meanwhile, nginx saw an overall growth of 10.6M sites this month, with the largest nginx hosting company, Hetzner Online AG, contributing an additional 1.6M sites.
In terms of active sites the survey was less volatile. Apache still experienced an overall loss, however much smaller at just 288k active sites. The biggest increase came from nginx, and was unrelated to their large hostname gain described earlier, with Peer1 Networks gaining 1.5M
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/04/02/april-2013-web-server-survey.html
http://www.netcraft.com/internet-data-mining/taxonomy-of-internet-services-companies/
This is a site that change from Apache to Nginx it now ranks I believe either a 98 on pingdom or a 95 and comes in under a second for all three points
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Hi Dana,
Thomas makes good points in regards nginx and lightspeed, but since making changes to server setup can sometimes be a big pain it is worth verifying if the page loads times have really been affected as you think.
The pagespeed insights numbers can be a bit deceiving in that they are telling you how many 'best practice' checkboxes you have ticked while not actually telling you how fast your pages are loading. You could have a pagespeed value of only 50 for example, but pages loading in 1.5 seconds (fast in other words). First thing to do if you havent already is to check the page speed times in analytics (content -> site speed) and see what numbers they are giving you and if they have gone up at all since you installed the apache modules. I cannot think of any technical reason for those modules to negatively affect page speed times, but it is worth checking. Also worth checking page load times through a tool that mimics higher server loads. I have used http://loadimpact.com/ which seems pretty good.
Once you have determined your real page load times you can then assess if there is a problem and the best way to approach it (which can depend a lot on what the root cause of the slow times is).
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Hi Dana,
I would use a CDN get the speed off Comcast my 2cents
Use http://torbit.com/insight/
Free to find the problem.
test
http://smartbear.com/products/qa-tools/load-testing
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/340564/best-way-to-stress-test-a-website
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9597109/free-load-testing-tool-for-website
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/26/torbit-insight/
by using MaxCDN $34 for 1TB good price
Then use Google along with
http://www.gomez.com/google-adwords/instant-test/
http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test
To test
To fix use
https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/speeding-up-your-site-mod_expire.25455/
http://www.askapache.com/hacking/speed-site-caching-cache-control.html
http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/3436911/Apache-Server-Performance-Optimization.htm
http://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/c_website-optimization.html
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
http://www.askapache.com/hacking/speed-site-caching-cache-control.html#Apache_Caching
http://www.askapache.com/hacking/speed-site-caching-cache-control.html#htaccess_time_cheatsheet
http://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/c_website-optimization.html
http://www.rubyrobot.org/article/5-tips-for-faster-loading-web-sites
If you moved to LightSpeed you can get it on VPS.net & Firehost you would not have this problem
other Nginx & fast offerings
http://asmallorange.com/hosting/cloud/#tab-one
Pair is fast & knows apache
http://vps.net/cloud-servers/linux-vps
Hope this was of help,
Thomas
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Thanks Lynn. Yes, this is exactly what we do. It does appear that page load speeds have progressively gotten slower and slower since the beginning of this year, which it when we started our initiative to improve speed. Google Webmaster Tools is also reporting that our average page load time for the past 90 days is 1108 milliseconds, which is significantly worse than the 745 millisecond "time spend downloading a page" we had at the beginning of this year.
Thanks to Thomas's suggestions, our IT director spent some time evaluating some of our pages (and site as a whole) to find out what the major culprits are. It appears that our images are over 50% of the contribution to the time it's taking for a page to load. We are now thinking that perhaps spending some time and effort optimizing images might help a great deal.
FYI - Our Avg. Page Load Time has increased about 8.5% for USA Traffic since we installed mod_expire and mod_deflate on our server in May/June - It has gone from 4.17 seconds up to 4.29 seconds. As an ecommerce site we have seen the data that shows the impact on conversion rates when a site/page takes more than two second to load, so it's definitely something we are working hard to address.
Thanks so much for jumping in on this one!
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Thank you so much Thomas. You always amaze me with your thorough and excellent answers here in the Q & A. I appreciate it very very much.
I forwarded your info to our IT Director and he and I had a discussion about CDNs. He seems to think that, while a good solution, they are also extremely costly. I wonder about this because I believe Volusion is using CDNs on all of their sites now. We are self-hosted (and wanting to get out of the self-hosting business) so your comments on choosing nginx over Apache will come in very handy as we move towards a new platform and a 3rd party host.
Are you aware of any affordable CDN options?
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hi Dana,
thank you so much for the kind words.
I honestly believe the best prices right now can be found using net DNA/max CDN they are extremely flexible when it comes to pricing.
the best place to go for what you're asking I believe is either going to be Max CDN or net DNA they are so good and so competitive price wise that you will get what you want.
Max CDN with DNS made easy is maybe one of the best deals on the Internet
Both networks are faster than Amazon, and each is run off of the same points of presence I would definitely try the terabyte of Max CDN and start a dialogue with their net DNA salespeople. I can also give you a good friend of mine at Level 3 he has really helped me quite a bit, and I have done a huge favor for him in the past so it's not like he owes me anything, but he's very very kind. I would be more than happy to put you in touch with him
Like most things the more you use the better the price. However,I have good friends at level III that have offered me pricing I thought was impossible. The trick is to ask for a much lower price than what they're offering. I have to private message you to tell you some more stuff but I can tell you I have a content delivery network on quite a few sites more than 10, I can't tell you my prices and be honest to these guys were fair on this. I will private messages them
the reason being is I have simply tried them all out and then found out they get extremely aggressive on pricing when you pit them against a competitor.
I will tell you this companies like level III and net DNA/max CDN offer fantastic support that's a big deal to me I really like the idea of being able to e-mail or call somebody and have my issue solved.
Amazon has a decent content delivery network however their support is so expensive it makes it ridiculous.
Rack space uses Akamai however it's not the fastest version of Akamai but is still very good they being rack space do offer support, and I would recommend them over Amazon any day.
However for a site like you are talking about Max CDN is spectacular it is faster than Amazon it has support phone and e-mail they will really work with you to make sure you're happy.
Here is a comparison however keep in mind different CDN companies cater to different needs for instance catch fly is an awesome CDN if you don't use video.
I don't use video because I use Wistia lightspeed is awesome for video so is Level 3 while Level 3 is spectacular at everything to be honest.
How many terabytes per year are we talking about? Do you have any idea if you know your page views which I'm sure you do the companies can give you a very spot quote.
I would call up that DNA and tell them you would like to use the Net DNA version of their SAAS offering however you would like to spend the same amount as you do on MaxCDN I believe that they will help you with this.
With that you will get a phenomenal system literally a top-tier content delivery network and at a price that cannot be beat.
Now I know when you get into the hundreds of terabytes a year which I'm not in that you will start seeing even larger discounts and it might be better to go with one company over another.
I would strongly pay attention to DNS when I do this if you're talking about one website you're in business this is awesome news because you can utilize my favorite
DynECT DNS and get there 11 years of uptime on your side along with lightning fast query resolution.
http://dyn.com/dns/dynect-managed-dns-lite/
or
http://dyn.com/dns/dynect-managed-dns/
If you want to save money and still have a very high quality DNS DNS made easy is really the only option out there in my opinion.
http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/dns-hosts-comparison/
They have 8 years of uptime and offer 5 million queries per month at $25 a year. I can't beat that price.
an excellent website to compare content delivery networks is http://www.cdnplanet.com/
http://www.cdnplanet.com/cdns/netdna/
one of the best systems I've ever used is turbo bytes
Level3, EdgeCast, Internap, NetDNA, fastly, ChinaCache and Bitgravity.
the best place to go for what you're asking I believe is either going to be Max CDN or net DNA they are so good and so competitive price wise that you will get what you want.
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/media/pricing/
this is advertised as if it is just for WordPress it is not it is able to be used on any website
incorporating Akamai, edge cast, Max CDN and Amazon it makes a very tempting offer
is a Content Delivery Network with 65+ points of presence around the world
part of http://onapp.com/pricing/#cdn
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
https://www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn is not a true content delivery network I know people will disagree with me when I say that however all it is is a reverse proxy server like fastly it does cash things but not nearly as well as some of the networks I have listed.
I don't like club where for quite a few reasons the Main reason being when Spamhaus was attacked the way they tried to mitigate the attack was by releasing it across their any cast DNS network this is crazy it hurts every user and the only reason they can do it is because they give away their DNS along with their so-called CDN.
I would not use them because of many more reasons which I can get into if you like however it's worth paying for a company that will give you true service when needed along with using a private cloud to deal with the DOS attacks
I would use ultra DNS or VeriSign simply for the DOS attacks and would not pay their prices for DNS when you can beat them using Dyn or DNS made easy
the fact that DNS made easy is so inexpensive and comes with tier 1 networks only connecting to them gives you a lot better DNS platform than cloud flare
their prices are worth it. Both Dyn & DSME
This quote should read millions of cloud flare users because that is the real truth
" all of the CloudFlare Internet users have experienced delays in services or could not reach a particular Web site for a short time."
so you know the true quote reads "millions of Internet users"
and is regarding this attack referenced below.
CloudFlare, which we should note specializes in DDoS attack mitigation and was called in by Spamhaus
They failed to stop it now it was huge, and I don't believe you impossible because routers have 10 Gb and this was over 300 Gb's allegedly something many believe Did not occur at the level they imply including myself.
sorry for a super long answer but look for my private message and thank you,
Thomas
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Hi Dana,
I just looked in my outbound messages and saw I had not sent you this I am sorry for that. I will send this is a private messages well.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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Hi Thomas,
My apologies for the extremely long time it took me to respond. Once Fall hit we got very busy! Thanks so much for the info on hosting and CDN, this is very, very helpful. We have just gone through several months where we experienced a significant amount of downtime, so I am hoping that if I kick and scream enough and show these folks how downtime impacts their revenue, they will finally make a change. Things move very, very slowly in small businesses, so I will have to be patient, but hopefully we can get there. Your suggestions have been pure gold and I really, really appreciate you taking the time to share your expertise.
Dana
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Hi Dana,
I appreciate that very much.
I am very sorry to hear about the down time obviously not be able to view a site is the worst user experience possible.
Fire host is the best host available. For an e-commerce website I would very strongly recommend using them there uptime is legendary and their services absolutely awesome. What you might pay for a little bit in security you will receive back and peace of mind along with a reduction of cost from your POS provider because of their PCI 3 compliant hosting you should be able to save quite a bit on Visa and MasterCard I know American Express does not participate in this.
Running on fire host you don't do any work at all if there's a problem with the server you simply let them know via ticket or via phone 24 7 somebody is there. They will put your site on DynECT DNS for only $10 a very good deal. And offer edge cast the fastest CDN available at a very reasonable price. You can always save money on the CDN by using MaxCDN with fire host.
However if that's not an option here are 2 others
Digital ocean is a company that is very new, but has very high quality equipment however they're not managed Sucuri can do that for you. I think they would make a great synergy and you could have a failover VPS here it is below.
the very best post for any e-commerce site is going to be fire host they give you everything you need and their uptime is impeccable It is absolutely unbelievable.
I have two solutions that I believe would be a good fit for your situation would be
https://www.linode.com/managed/ they charge $100 more than the actual server per month to manage it the server cost is surprisingly low so it's a pretty good deal.
https://www.linode.com/linodes/
Digital Ocean a rocket ship hosting provider that is going neck and neck with Linode both of them offer very impressive performance however digital ocean is significantly less money.
This is an excellent guide but switch out AWS for digital ocean or Linode
Using the tips in this website will give you what you need to have a very fast and robust website.
Sign up for Google page speed and implement it via the methods on the site
http://www.feedthebot.com/pagespeed/
With Google page speed runs its own CDN
http://wordimpress.com/aws-ec2-rds-s3-cloudfront-nginx-wordpress-tutorial-roundup/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/09/20/how-to-make-your-site-insanely-fast/
I would use two of the less expensive but just as fast digital ocean VPS is with a failover
Then run 2 VPS's on digital ocean at $20 a VPS they are a fantastic deal. Running Nginx instead of Apache will reduce your RAM consumption to 1/8 of what was before
$20 VPS
2GB Memory
2 Cores
40GB SSD Disk
3TB Transfer
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
Fastly & AWS cloud front (cloud front is now capable of running both static and dynamic content very impressive) or MaxCDN great pricing , rack space cloud files as a CDN would be a great mix.
So Fastly CDN with two 2GB VPS's on digital ocean each in separate data centers. Simply clone your site
With one of the 4 options Digital Ocean gives you here
digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-choose-an-effective-backup-strategy-for-your-vps
If you chose to use DNS with failover you could create a 100% uptime environment even if one of the servers or data centers went down. Or there were server issues. Within 2 min. you would be running on the other data center entirely.
Normally I would recommend DynECT they are my favorite however you can save money and get very close to the same performance using DNS made easy
http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/services/dns-failover-system-monitoring/managed
You would be best off selecting either the $50 a year plan or the $25 a year plan then paying $5 a year for a failover I would buy the mid tier plan it comes with a lot more.
If you spent $40 a month you could get a rocket ship that would allow you 2 gigs of RAM for each VPS setup
DNS with DNS made easy either purchase the $50 a year plan or purchase the $25 year plan and add the
The best security for the money at $9 a month is definitely the Sucuri CloudProxy
Web Application Firewall (WAF) · Virtual Website patching · Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) · DDOS and Brute force protection · Prevent malware and blacklisting
Video
http://cloudproxy.sucuri.net/features#feature-patch
Digital Ocean has so quite a few data centers in the United States. All you have to do is run a script to clone your site because the pricing of digital ocean starts at $5 a month for one core with 512 MB of RAM and full SSD's all high-end equipment.
One smart way if you want to run a managed server on digital ocean is to hire Sucuri they will do it for the same price Linode charges and give you quite a bit. Meaning you will not have to worry about any sort of security issues or server problems.
Because your site will failover in under 2 min. in the event of an issue and the digital ocean infrastructure is designed to let you clone your site on another data center no matter what happens to your 1st site you can always move over to your 2nd. Your DNS will do this for you in under 2 min. automatically if using DNS made easy
Sucuri MSSP - Managed Server Security Program
Over the past 12 months there has been a sharp increase in the evolution of website attacks, where attackers are tunneling deeper beyond the application layer and affecting various infrastructure elements. Because of this, we're releasing our new program - Managed Server Security Program (MSSP).
What is included?
This program utilizing a number of our own proprietary products to assist in managing the security of private servers (dedicated and virtual). The product will offer you a number of the following services:
Professional management of your web servers security
System audit of your environment, recommendation and security implementations
Installation and configuration of our File Integrity Monitoring Daemon (FIMD)
Installation and configuration of our Realtime Enterprise Log Management (RELM) AND LIDS - log-based intrusion detection system
Real time management and security response teams in the event of compromise
Who should use this service?
Any website owner that is responsible for their own web server, whether utilizing a VPS or a dedicated box. It is not for shared-hosts.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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PS it appears your website is 301 redirecting a lot of calls you can see them lit in almost a florescent blue during the speed test I ran here.
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/ds3ceI/CCISOLUTIONS.COM
1 good idea is to use the free pingdom RUM or real user measurement testing. It will show you what your end users actually see.
Another great tool is neustars RUM tool they actually provide you with simulated real users if you want to see the maximum amount of users per minute your site can handle. It is free for 30 days and well worth the effort. Pingdom RUM is free for life.
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