General Discussion Archives

July 30, 2024July 30, 2024

Hosting Resource Series – CPU Cores

Most web hosting providers offer resource limits on their services. Understanding these resource limits can help you make an informed decision when purchasing or upgrading a hosting service.

Layman Explanation – “The Car Analogy”

I often like to use what I call “The Car Analogy” to explain CPU cores. I use a car to represent a CPU core and people being transported to represent website visits.

Single CPU Core:

Imagine for a moment that you have one car instead of one CPU core. One individual car (CPU core) can move people (website visits) from one location to another, and it is designed and intended for this purpose.

Let us also imagine that the car will always move as fast as it is capable of doing. You do, after all, want to get where you’re going as quickly as you can, right? Your one car can only move people so fast, and it can go no faster.

April 27, 2023April 27, 2023

Understanding TTFB: Why Lower TTFB Isn’t Always Better

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a metric used to measure the responsiveness of a web server. It is the time taken for the server to send the first byte of data to the client. While a lower TTFB is generally desirable, it’s not always the best indicator of overall website performance. In this blog post, we will explore the relationship between TTFB and PHP output buffering, and discuss how optimizing for a low TTFB can sometimes be misleading.

TTFB and PHP Output Buffering

TTFB can be influenced by various factors, such as network latency, server processing time, and PHP output buffering. PHP output buffering is a technique where the server buffers the output of a script before sending it to the client. This can help improve performance by allowing the server to send larger chunks of data at once, rather than sending small bits of data as they become available. Additionally, output buffering can be beneficial when running a site built with plugins from various developers, such as is common with WordPress. In these situations, different plugins may send headers at different times, and without output buffering, this can cause errors as the server is only allowed to return response headers once.

However, focusing on a low TTFB can lead to a false sense of optimization. For example, you can artificially deflate TTFB by sending a single byte of data immediately before doing any significant processing and flushing the output buffer. This will result in a lower TTFB, but the overall load time for the user remains the same. In other words, a low TTFB doesn’t always equate to a better user experience.

October 14, 2022October 14, 2022

How many visitors can my account handle?!?!?

Long Exposure of Vehicles Traveling at Night

Quite often our clients and potential clients ask us a question that on its face seems simple: How many visitors can my account handle? This question is not as simple as it seems.

As with any deceptively simple question there is more to it than a simple number. We wish we could simply give a number as a response but to do so would be disingenuous and deceptive from our perspective. We know that there is far more to the question and the answer than a simple number.

If all sites were created equal and all sites used the same amount of resources per visit, transmitted the same amount of data, performed the same SQL queries, etc – the answer would be simple. In the real world every website is different. We have some clients that are handling more than 100,000 visitors per month on our cheapest and least-powerful plans and then we have other clients on our most powerful and most expensive plans that are struggling with only a few thousand.

We don’t want to make what seems like a promise – that you can hit a particular number of monthly visitors – when it’s not something we can guarantee as we do not control your content or applications.