I have three MEAN Stack built web applications hosted on a shared hosting plan. It's running really slow (takes minutes to login and minutes to call the database) and I'm not sure how to optimise the performance. I have created three backend servers so that each application can can call the backend separately. I have ensured that my files are gzipped and are on HTTP3. What else should/can I do on top on that? I can't seem to find much related information online. Please give me any suggestions that you may have!
Would implementing lazy loading help? If so, please share some easy examples because I'm still new. Much appreciated!
I'd suggest moving off of shared hosting and using one of the newer generation developer-focused hosting platforms like Render or Adaptable.io. Adaptable includes MongoDB, so it's great for MEAN stack. With Render, you'd probably use MongoDB Atlas. Both provide free tiers that smaller apps can fit within.
With any of the next-gen hosting platforms, you just connect a GitHub repo with your source code and they automatically deploy your app to the cloud. You don't have to deal with keeping servers up to date, optimizing database performance or anything like that.
Related
I'm a mobile/front-end developer and need help with the architecture on the back-end where I'm totally green. I'm building web and mobile front in Flutter that will communicate with the server written in GO. Based on the config file attached the Flutter front I will create few separate apps, but for every single app I need a separate instance of the back-end services or at least separate database.
My question is about what architecture I should use in terms of future scaling to lower the server maintenance costs while having the best performance. Correct me if I'm wrong because what I will write is the image of my understanding of the structure but based on what I wrote above - am I correct that I should use some load balancer with the business logic spread across Kubernetes instances and only have separate database for every single Flutter app? Or is there any other solution I'm unaware about? Any help or guides that will at least lead me to more knowledge I can learn would be much appreciated.
I don't know yet whether it's a perfect solution but I will leave it if someone in future will be looking for it. My friend who codes in PHP introduced me to the multi tenant architecture pattern and after I've researched it I find it a good solution to what I've been looking for.
I'm a newbie web developer and I have a basic question regarding my Laravel based website: Where should I put my files? I know there are services like Amazon S3, but firstly I don't know how to work with them, and second they are NOT FREE.
There is going to be a fairly large amount of data including pics and videos (around 10 GB).where should I store them? And how should I use Laravel to allow users to upload files?
If it will be a bigger project, you should use a cloud service. This is going to be the future of backend development as it is making your project much easier and faster to mantain and run. If you want to make your own backend, this will take a long time to get it done, since you have to learn a lot of new things and should be good at it. There would be many key aspects you have to be aware of. Like securitiy, scaling, performance and so on ... Like you suggested Amazon AWS or imo much better Google Firebase. I think Google Firebase should be your pick because it is really easy do understand and has a great documentation. Next to the storing service (Google Cloud Storage) there are many several services you could use in the future like analytics, machine learning or nosql databases. And the good thing is that you can connect them all together.
With Google Firebase you have a Free Spark Plan which is completely free with some limitations. And if you scale to many users you can upgrade to the other plans, which is not very expensive. Don't forget that your own Back-End would cost you time and also money for the electricity and hardware cost.
If you have more questions be free to ask me :)
We're currently evaluating Heroku to replace the initial workflow of renting a VPS for a small Web App (since we're working on NodeJS, cPanel hosting plans aren't enough, ergo, VPS).
The confusion lies in Heroku's actual usage as even though it's clear it's used as a platform as a service, there is no Disk (HDD/SSD) limit described.
Web App requirement includes file upload capabilities (profile picture, etc) so I'm not sure Heroku is what we need. Can I get a clear explanation on this?
Not a Heroku expert, but...
You could always use one of the various add-ins that offer database support for storing your images until that no longer works
As the usage of your site scales out, you'd probably want to place static content into a CDN.
I wouldn't consider placing files into Heroku that weren't related to running code and honestly I don't even know if you can.
(I originally just wanted to comment, but need a higher rep :/)
Is cloud hosting the way to go? Or is there something better that delivers fast page loads?
The reason I ask is because I run a buddypress site on a bluehost dedicated server, but it seems to run slow at most times of the day. This scares me because at the moment the sites not live and I'm afraid when it gets traffic it'll become worse and my visitors will lose interest. I use Amazon Cloud to handle all my media, JS, and CSS files along with a catching plugin, but it still loads slow at times.
I feel like the problem is Bluehost, because I visit other sites running buddypress and their sites seem to load instantly. Im not web hosting savvy so can someone please point me in the right direction here?
The hosting choice depends on many factors such as technical requirements, growth rates, burst rates, budgets and more.
Bigger Hardware
To scale up hosting operation, your first choice is often just using a more powerful server, VPS, or cloud instance. The point is not so much cloud vs. dedicated but that you simply bring more compute power to the problem. Cloud can make scaling up easier - often with a few clicks.
Division of Labor
The next step often is division of labor. You offload database, static content, caching or other items to specific servers or services. For example, you could offload static content to a CDN. You could a dedicated database.
Once again, cloud vs non-cloud is not the issue. The point is to bring more resources to your hosting problems.
Pick the Right Application Stack
I cannot stress enough picking the right underlying technology for your needs. For example, I've recently helped a client switch from a Apache/PHP stack to a Varnish/Nginx/PHP-FPM stack for a very business Wordpress operation (>100 million page views/mo). This change boosted capacity by nearly 5X with modest hardware changes.
Same App. Different Story
Also just because you are using a specific application, it does not mean the same hosting setup will work for you. I don't know about the specific app you are using but with Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Vbulletin and others, the plugins, site design, themes and other items are critical to overall performance.
To complicate matter, user behavior is something to consider as well. Consider a discussion form that has a 95:1 read:post ratio. What if you do something in the design to encourage more posts and that ratio moves to 75:1. That means more database writes, less caching, etc.
In short, details matter, so get a good understanding of your application before you start to scale out hosting.
A hosting service is part of the solution. Another part is proper server configuration.
For instance this guy has optimized his setup to serve 10 million requests in a day off a micro-instance on AWS.
I think you should look at your server config first, then shop for other hosts. If you can't control server configuration, try AWS, Rackspace or other cloud services.
just an FYI: You can sign up for AWS and use a micro instance free for one year. The link I posted - he just optimized on the same server. You might have to upgrade to a small server because Amazon has stated that micro is only to handle spikes and sustained traffic.
Good luck.
I have been doing some catching up lately by reading about cloud hosting.
For a client that has about the same characteristics as StackOverflow (Windows stack, same amount of visitors), I need to set up a hosting environment. Stackoverflow went from renting to buying.
The question is why didn't they choose cloud hosting?
Since Stackoverflow doesn't use any weird stuff that needs to run on a dedicated server and supposedly cloud hosting is 'the' solution, why not use it?
By getting answers to this question I hope to be able to make a weighted decision myself.
I honestly do not know why SO runs like it does, on privately owned servers.
However, I can assume why a website would prefer this:
Maintainability - when things DO go wrong, you want to be hands-on on the problem, and solve it as quickly as possible, without needing to count on some third-party. Of course the downside is that you need to be available 24/7 to handle these problems.
Scalability - Cloud hosting (or any external hosting, for that matter) is very convenient for a small to medium-sized site. And most of the hosting providers today do give you the option to start small (shared hosting for example) and grow to private servers/VPN/etc... But if you truly believe you will need that extra growth space, you might want to count only on your own infrastructure.
Full Control - with your own servers, you are never bound to any restrictions or limitations a hosting service might impose on you. Run whatever you want, hog your CPU or your RAM, whatever. It's your server. Many hosting providers do not give you this freedom (unless you pay up, of course :) )
Again, this is a cost-effectiveness issue, and each business will handle it differently.
I think this might be a big reason why:
Cloud databases are typically more
limited in functionality than their
local counterparts. App Engine returns
up to 1000 results. SimpleDB times out
within 5 seconds. Joining records from
two tables in a single query breaks
databases optimized for scale. App
Engine offers specialized storage and
query types such as geographical
coordinates.
The database layer of a cloud instance
can be abstracted as a separate
best-of-breed layer within a cloud
stack but developers are most likely
to use the local solution for both its
speed and simplicity.
From Niall Kennedy
Obviously I cannot say for StackOverflow, but I have a few clients that went the "cloud hosting" route. All of which are now frantically trying to get off of the cloud.
In a lot of cases, it just isn't 100% there yet. Limitations in user tracking (passing of requestor's IP address), fluctuating performance due to other load on the cloud, and unknown usage number are just a few of the issues that have came up.
From what I've seen (and this is just based on reading various blogged stories) most of the time the dollar-costs of cloud hosting just don't work out, especially given a little bit of planning or analysis. It's only really valuable for somebody who expects highly fluctuating traffic which defies prediction, or seasonal bursts. I guess in it's infancy it's just not quite competitive enough.
IIRC Jeff and Joel said (in one of the podcasts) that they did actually run the numbers and it didn't work out cloud-favouring.
I think Jeff said in one of the Podcasts that he wanted to learn a lot of things about hosting, and generally has fun doing it. Some headaches aside (see the SO blog), I think it's a great learning experience.
Cloud computing definitely has it's advantages as many of the other answers have noted, but sometimes you just want to be able to control every bit of your server.
I looked into it once for quite a small site. Running a small Amazon instance for a year would cost around £700 + bandwidth costs + S3 storage costs. VPS hosting with similar specs and a decent bandwidth allowance chucked in is around £500. So I think cost has a lot to do with it unless you are going to have fluctuating traffic and lots of it!
I'm sure someone from SO will answer it but "Isn't just more hassle"? Old school hosting is still cheap and unless you got big scalability problems why would you do cloud hosting?