Web hosting for NZ based ecommerce?

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20163 posts

Uber Geek

#1362857 11-Aug-2015 14:08

Using CDNs can also help. The thing is that all the extra work needed to get a website hosted on slow servers loading well, you may as well just go to a hosted ecommerce solution, if it has the functionality you need. I have had problems with cloudflare and caching of some things which affected some scripts after doing plugin and theme upgrades, so it can be a hairpulling experience.

richms

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#1362860 11-Aug-2015 14:11

Don't blame the cache for the broken plugin process. There are well established best practice processes for versioning the filename for these things so that it doesnt happen. If the script authors are stupid enough to update a file and keep the name the same then stuff like that happens.

Same files will get cached with the same expiration on corporate proxies and also browser cache. Its a plugin/theme issue.

Richard rich.ms

mattwnz

20163 posts

Uber Geek

#1362892 11-Aug-2015 15:06

richms: Don't blame the cache for the broken plugin process. There are well established best practice processes for versioning the filename for these things so that it doesnt happen. If the script authors are stupid enough to update a file and keep the name the same then stuff like that happens.

Same files will get cached with the same expiration on corporate proxies and also browser cache. Its a plugin/theme issue.

It is not usually the cache as you can purge it, but things like the extra compression settings in cloudfalre. There are warnings in cloudflare that some of the setting can affect some things. The thing is that the developers can only test certain things, so if you update a theme or plugin , you may have a broken website or have to roll it back, until the developers have fixed the issue.

boland

545 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1362909 11-Aug-2015 15:24

timmmay: Cloudflare can make a HUGE difference even just for with basic caching for a very lightly loaded website, if you set it up properly. For example I have an image heavy website hosted in the USA, it used to take 12 seconds to load - super slow. Once I put it onto Cloudflare AND set the headers up to allow caching of images, css, and js the load time dropped to 3 seconds - they have a POP in Auckland. I set static resources to basically never expire, you can manually purge their cache if required. I can drop that even lower by setting headers to cache pages - I can achieve around 1 second website load times, at the expense of some pages being stale. You of course only cache pages that rarely change - product pages, but not ordering or shopping cart pages.

Putting CloudFlare in is only step one - configuration is really important. I do this for a lot of my customers. I have a pretty decent sized set of techniques in this area.

Thank you. I have never looked into caching configuration of Cloudflare to be honest. I was using the basic stuff.
Just looked into HTML caching and our homepage now loads bloody fast :) Check it out: eurodress .co.nz
Google Pagespeed Insights doesn't use it though. Server response time: 3.3 seconds :( :(

timmmay

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#1362912 11-Aug-2015 15:32

Homepage isn't bad, but generally the website feels pretty slow. I'll have a look later, but I suspect it's more around processing time than static resources. I do think there's a chance your host is correct that you need to look at the code and database for optimisation. I spent a year as a performance engineer and have a business that does a fair bit of SEO and performance work, with a background in development. I could potentially help speed things up.

mattwnz

20163 posts

Uber Geek

#1362913 11-Aug-2015 15:32

boland:
Just looked into HTML caching and our homepage now loads bloody fast :) Check it out: eurodress .co.nz
Google Pagespeed Insights doesn't use it though. Server response time: 3.3 seconds :( :(

It seem to load slowly for me, so I would hate to see how slow it was before that.

You probably should ask any host you are looking at how many websites they allow per server, and gets stats for server loads and uptime stats. Have you asked your current host why it is so slow?

boland

545 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1362938 11-Aug-2015 15:47

mattwnz:
boland:
Just looked into HTML caching and our homepage now loads bloody fast :) Check it out: eurodress .co.nz
Google Pagespeed Insights doesn't use it though. Server response time: 3.3 seconds :( :(

It seem to load slowly for me, so I would hate to see how slow it was before that.

You probably should ask any host you are looking at how many websites they allow per server, and gets stats for server loads and uptime stats.

Can you please test again?
I've now cached everything except /order

Yes, the performance is quite bad with Openhost. E.g. certain pages in the backend like the Modules list always take a very long time to load, sometimes even causing timeouts.

Good thing is that I already have been contacted by Openhost because of this topic. They are going to find a better hosting option at one of their platforms. We'll see what the outcome is.

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boland

545 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1362941 11-Aug-2015 15:51

timmmay: Homepage isn't bad, but generally the website feels pretty slow. I'll have a look later, but I suspect it's more around processing time than static resources. I do think there's a chance your host is correct that you need to look at the code and database for optimisation. I spent a year as a performance engineer and have a business that does a fair bit of SEO and performance work, with a background in development. I could potentially help speed things up.

As I said, I'm using Prestashop. Thousands and thousands of websites are using this. I cannot / do no want / should not want to change the code.

And, on Azure it was relatively quick, much faster than now. As it is heavily using SQL, I'm 99% sure it's the MySQL server.

I have now enabled caching on every page, except the order page. The website should be super fast. The only minor issue is that your cart initially shows a cached cart... For now that's fine with me.

mattwnz

20163 posts

Uber Geek

#1362946 11-Aug-2015 15:54

I am now getting an error as below. I see that it is redirecting to https, I wonder if that could be part of the reason for the slowness.

Unable to complete secure transaction

You tried to access the address http://www.eurodress.co.nz/, which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the web address (URL) is correctly spelled and punctuated, then try reloading the page.

Secure connection: fatal error (80) from server.

https:// eurodress .co.nz/

boland

545 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1362949 11-Aug-2015 15:59

mattwnz: I am now getting an error as below. I see that it is redirecting to https, I wonder if that could be part of the reason for the slowness.

Unable to complete secure transaction

You tried to access the address http://www.eurodress.co.nz/, which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the web address (URL) is correctly spelled and punctuated, then try reloading the page.

Secure connection: fatal error (80) from server.

https:// eurodress .co.nz/

I haven't seen this error before? Everything is working fine.
ANd yes, you are correct, I force SSL everywhere in the site. Didn't notice a big difference at that time, and read some articles that SSL-enabled site receive a slightly higher ranking in Google.
May be I turn that off.

mattwnz

20163 posts

Uber Geek

#1362950 11-Aug-2015 16:02

boland:
mattwnz: I am now getting an error as below. I see that it is redirecting to https, I wonder if that could be part of the reason for the slowness.

Unable to complete secure transaction

You tried to access the address http://www.eurodress.co.nz/, which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the web address (URL) is correctly spelled and punctuated, then try reloading the page.

Secure connection: fatal error (80) from server.

https:// eurodress .co.nz/

I haven't seen this error before? Everything is working fine.
ANd yes, you are correct, I force SSL everywhere in the site. Didn't notice a big difference at that time, and read some articles that SSL-enabled site receive a slightly higher ranking in Google.
May be I turn that off.

I am still getting it, I am using the Opera browser. Maybe there is something going on at the server side.

boland

545 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1362964 11-Aug-2015 16:23

mattwnz:
boland:
mattwnz: I am now getting an error as below. I see that it is redirecting to https, I wonder if that could be part of the reason for the slowness.

Unable to complete secure transaction

You tried to access the address http://www.eurodress.co.nz/, which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the web address (URL) is correctly spelled and punctuated, then try reloading the page.

Secure connection: fatal error (80) from server.

https:// eurodress .co.nz/

I haven't seen this error before? Everything is working fine.
ANd yes, you are correct, I force SSL everywhere in the site. Didn't notice a big difference at that time, and read some articles that SSL-enabled site receive a slightly higher ranking in Google.
May be I turn that off.

I am still getting it, I am using the Opera browser. Maybe there is something going on at the server side.

I've just installed Opera, and it's working fine?
I've disabled "Force SSL" for every page.

timmmay

20580 posts

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#1363008 11-Aug-2015 17:18

Tests say your home page is pretty good now - see here. Feels much faster than before you started playing with Cloudflare. Just be careful not to cache things you shouldn't. If you want to force https create a pagerule, make it the first rule.

boland

545 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1363013 11-Aug-2015 17:27

timmmay: Tests say your home page is pretty good now - see here. Feels much faster than before you started playing with Cloudflare. Just be careful not to cache things you shouldn't. If you want to force https create a pagerule, make it the first rule.

Force HTTPS can be done in Prestashop as well.

But thanks for the tip! I now cache the homepage, and everything under dress shirts. On the free plan I can only have 3 page rules, but that's enough for now too.

I also noticed that Smarty template compilation was force enabled (disabled by default). Forgot to disable that after recent change. Makes a difference as well.

mattwnz

20163 posts

Uber Geek

#1363014 11-Aug-2015 17:28

It loads for me now, although I see it is going through http, not https

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