Category Archives: Why CLDMV

New Testing for speed comparisons

While we still continue to compare new client’s sites with Pagespeed. We have also put together a tool which will show us aggregated time/count/sizes of loaded websites. Below is a read out of latest as well as Pagespeed results:

 

Site  Response Time  Load Time  Download (First Load)  Page Speed Score  Cost
Original340ms3.34s4.24MB  64 /   50?
Compare300ms1.38s3.5MB  88 /   70150$~

Shared Hosting

CLDMV is proud to announce that by February 1st 2014 we will be offering shared hosting on the same platform which runs our hybrid servers. While there will not be some features bundled into the system. Such as SSD, backup control, image compression, etc. It will still have the same system in the background.

This will allow customers to run non-critical applications for a reduced price. Pricing structure is still under consideration. However we will not be charging for bandwidth. Disk space charges are still up in the air.

Potentially we may charge a flat rate and give limits to the space available. We might also setup the same way we currently do with our Hybrid hosting and charge for space used. Which generally allows users to get their hosting for cheaper.

We will also be offering our Hybrid hosting clients extended backups which will automatically store their backups remotely. Pricing is still to be decided with this feature. It may roll out as a free feature.

Various Updates

CLDMV has opened a Development portion to our business. With this clients or anyone for that matter can contact us for web development. We are also partnered with 1stwebstudio for design projects. So all that’s left is to offer is domains, SSLs, SEO. While we do provide domains and SSLs already there is no automation in this process.

Also CLDMV has opened a Twitter and Tumblr account for people who wish to follow updates and posts through those forms of media. The blog site has also had some minor changes in design related to social networking.

Moving forward we excited to be able to provide most web related services to existing and new clients. We are still looking for a reliable and friendly service for SEO.

New feature for JS and CSS

Any website hosted with CLDMV can now automatically serve up concatenated JS and CSS files. For example:

http://cdn.cldmv.net/cldmv/min/cldmv/jquery/?base64.js,decode.js

The above URL is two separate files put together and minified as well. Now lets go over the portions of the URL:

The prefix of the URL (this is required in order to get the script to work.

The directory:

Then the marker to indicate the files you want to serve (this is required and never changes):

Then finally the files you want to serve under the above directory:

Each file is separated by a comma.

Normally to get both of these scripts to run you would include the follow urls:

Instead you can now just include:

Update: Since Chrome has an issue with double question marks I’ve reduced the code to only require a single question mark.

 

Current Status of Control Panel, security updates, and server updates

First lets start with a screen shot of the dashboard in progress for the control panel.

current-cp

Unfortunately Data prior to the 28th of May 2014 is a bit skewed. But as you can see we have plenty of navigation so consumers never get lost. We also show are currently showing all site traffic for all sites hosted under a specific user. Though with some crashes here and there we might put these charts on their own separate page per domain but still give the user the ability to view an all domain report as it’s setup right now (at their own risk).

Currently the theming for the charts is still to be completed. But we have the ability to show and hide specific points of data if we want, select a range of the data from the range bar below. And most importantly reset it all to dive into more data.

Updates outside of the control panel:

A lot of reforming to the back-end has happened in preparation of the control panel.

Security is always a concern when dealing with the online world. We have adjusted some security features. The control panel (unlike commercial panels today) will not actually be able to modify anything within the network per-say. What I mean by that is every command done through the control panel will actually hit a sub-system which allows or disallows access at that level. Which then hits the root system which can only run specific commands pre-written into the system. So unlike most control panels today where the code is on the forefront of the system, CLDMV’s back-end is segregated to many systems to prevent hacking. While data can be retrieved from the control panel anything which has to change the system will always be done through our set of sub-systems to insure stability and security.

Also it’s important to note there was a brief downtime of FTP log in and email receiving on 2014/05/31 at approx 5pm PST to 5:30pm PST. This was due to a mass restructuring of the back-end in order to support the new changes to come.

Log Parser V2

Prior to version 2 of he log parser the logs were simply dumped into the database for the past 60 days every hour. It was planned that Users could view these logs instantly through a control panel. But unless you really knew what you were looking at this data was sort of useless.

So we came up with V2 of the Log Parser. This parser parses errors and website access into tables which gives a lot more information about the logs. For example I can pull up a number of how many 404 errors happened on any site hosted with CLDMV on any day in the past 60 days. As well as any redirect. If I want to view all the 404 or redirects I can do so. This functionality will be included in the control panel asap.

Why did we do this?

Simple answer really. Analytics services can provide you with how many visits your site gets and a ton of data about this. However they only work on pages where their code is present. Since we can track on the server level we can provide a lot more data. This data helps website owners make critical decisions and code fixes where they see trends in their software.

“Why am I not being indexed by [insert name of search engine]?”

We hear this question quite often. Simply put we do not control how search engines index websites. But we can show you (now) that your site is being crawled by their bots. V2 of the log parser is also logs if the visit was a bot or not.

To show an example:

domainyearmonthdaybot_visitsbot_unique_visitsvisitsunique_visitsfourohfoursredirects
blog.cldmv.net201452720330500

The above results show this site’s basic stats for 2014-5-27. Visits and Unique visits are overall. So all we have to due to find human visits is subtract the bot visits from those numbers.

yearmonthdaydomaintimestampipreal_ipsslbotajaxresourceurlresponse_codevisitrefererbytesgzip_ratiolog_entryuser_agentrequest_typerequest_versionremote_user
2014528example.com140124881166.249.73.71110php/exampleurl.php30213166.249.73.71 - - [28/May/2014:03:46:51 +0000] "GET /exampleurl.php HTTP/1.1" 302 31 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" "-" "-" "https" "-"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)GETHTTP/1.1

Above is an example of all the data available through our Log Parse V2.

Automatic Optimization of images

I was cleaning out my email folder yesterday and I came across this old email. While I have removed anything that would specify who this email is with the results are still proving of CLDMV’s systems. I’m also pretty sure this email was prior to the double compression PNG system we currently use now.

As you can see from above not only did our system compress the images as much as Google said we could. But we were able to compress 1-4% more. Here is a recent daily report of our image compression system.

Keeping in mind all the compression is done lossless. Meaning there is no loss in visual quality. The only downside to the compression is if the images store data such as where they were taken, that data is removed.

 

New Security Features

Previously we had been using the over-popular Fail2Ban to scan our logs as a temporary fix for the issue. While the anti-DDOS software written by CLDMV takes care of a ton of bans every day. The hacking attempts are still being attempted by some what smarter hackers.

Today we rolled out our first module for log scanning. With SSH probably being the #1 threat to servers out there that is what we chose to target for our scanner. Took several days but the results are amazing. While I can’t divulge the inner workings of the module. Let me just show you the first ban email we got after running it for the first time:

Keep in mind these numbers and bans are simply based upon the past 24 hours of logs.

Update:

This guy takes the cake for CLDMV’s Anti-DDOS software catching a potential intrusion. Just received this email:

Also the log processing module for SMTP hackers is in place as well now. Here’s the first email for the past 24 hours of attempts:

Why CLDMV for hosting?

On average our clients are seeing a 20-30% increase in page speeds from their old hosting environments to CLDMV’s Servers. Roughly a 40% decrease in the size of downloaded content as all CSS/JS is minified, users can minify their HTML if they choose to do so and all images are compresses to the maximin they can be (completely lossless compression of course).

So far all of our clients have came to us from their own dedicated servers where they were paying on average 300$/month for their servers. CLDMV’s clients pay on average 130$/month as of writing this post. While essentially our service is “Shared hosting on steroids” it can also be compared to a “no limit” VPS. Since most people who are running online websites grow out of their shared hosting environment within the first couple years of business (assuming traffic increases at a steady rate) they don’t want all the hassle of managing a server.

Often more times than not they pay 30-40$/month to have a commercial control panel installed and on top of that pay a system administrator to change things when needed. With CLDMV changes are only a call away and once the control panel rolls out many operations of the hosting plan will be available via the control panel (free of charge).

In our experience most clients running online websites simply need a faster website. They don’t need nor want an entire dedicated server. The industry has forced users to upgrade to that point due to over selling and over crowding servers. Here at CLDMV we monitor everything on the servers daily and apply upgrades or code changes to keep the system running smoothly. Client stats are tracked every hour, server stats every 15 minutes. Traffic is always instantly tracked (logged every 60 seconds). Our mission is to provide affordable hosting with all the benefits of a going out and hiring a optimization company to come and optimize your dedicated server. With CLDMV you don’t have to hire or pay for anything extra for your service.

With many options available (some not listed or posted about yet) the possibilities of hosting with CLDMV are endless. Need your own or want to use your own database server? We got your covered. Need load balancing? We can do that as well (though our biggest servers can handle over 1000 512MB php threads at any given instance and up to 10Gbps of transfer). Just want complete isolation? We offer dedicated servers as well where all the optimization and management of the server is done by us and you have a completely isolated part of our network.

Lets step back for a minute. Any hosting company can offer you the world but can they deliver? Do they have hard numbers which prove their service? Lets let the numbers talk for themselves. Below is a table of response time, load time, downloaded content (with a hard refresh to force all content to be downloaded), google page speed score and estimated cost if any idea of cost is available.

Site 1: http://beautyjoint.com

 

Site  Response Time  Load Time  Download (First Load)  Page Speed Score  Cost
Original  575ms  2.25s  900KB  66  1000$~
Compare  444ms  1.56s  627KB  86  200$~

Site 2: http://adrianas.1stwebstudio.com/en/

 

Site  Response Time  Load Time  Download (First Load)  Page Speed Score  Cost
Original1.61s7.00s4.9MB46??
Compare775ms3.97s3.6MB86130$~??

Site 3: http://www.extasybooks.com/

 

Site  Response Time  Load Time  Download (First Load)  Page Speed Score  Cost
Old945ms5.85s1.1MBKB  74600$~
Current772ms1.97s  627KB  88300$~

 

Notes:

Site speeds and scores ran on 2014/05/07 at 4pm PST (for site 1 and site 2)

Links may or may not be valid at time of viewing.

Sites listed above have given permission to post these stats as a comparison of our service.