Category: Speed

Looking back 2 years ago at our promise to unleash a series of service enhancements after switching fully to Site Tools, we keep delivering! After launching the Ultrafast PHP, new MySQL setup on shared and cloud, SG Optimizer new features, and more, we have also reworked our DNS service to make it faster, safer, more flexible and easy to use than ever. Take a read at what we have done and how that affects your websites hosted on our platform. 

What’s under the hood of our new DNS service 

Let us first make a quick reminder – the DNS (domain name system) is what makes it possible for a domain name to open a specific website. This system indicates on which of all the servers in the whole internet your website is hosted. Usually, a specific set of 2 nameservers and 2 IPs correspond to each server and they should be added in your domain’s management panel for the system to work. Each server also has a DNS service installed on it that processes the DNS queries and shows the proper website when a visitor types your domain in the browser. 

With our new centralized DNS setup we no longer need DNS service installed on each of our production servers that host your website. We are able to move all our DNS services to a completely separate cluster of multiple servers. This cluster is dedicated for DNS service only and is geographically dispersed around the globe thanks to the super cool Anycast network routing technology. Centralized DNS also allows us to have just one pair of nameservers and IPs for all the servers that SiteGround manages, and these are:

• ns1.siteground.net
• ns2.siteground.net

What are the benefits of our new DNS service

Faster Domain Resolving, Faster Website Loading

When a visitor searches for your website’s domain, the first thing that the browser does is make a DNS lookup to see on which IP the domain resolves and connects to the server with that IP. With the previous DNS setup lookup requests coming from a different continent from your server’s were handled a bit slower due to the physical distance between the visitor and the server resolving your domain. Now, with the centralized DNS which works on five different geographical locations and multiple instances, the resolving is handled by the closest node saving networking delays and improving your website loading speed.

Enhanced Redundancy 

As the new DNS setup relies on multiple geographically dispersed machines, it is extremely resilient. For example if one of the DNS servers goes down, the DNS requests would be handled by the second closest point, which is up and running. This setup also guards against DDoS attacks, as if there is a high amount of malicious traffic, it will be distributed among multiple DNS machines and it becomes much more difficult for such an attack to succeed. On top of that the DNS service is super scalable, and new machines can be added easily whenever there is a need for more resources.

If you are using your domain simultaneously for your hosting at SiteGround and other services too (for example your MX records are pointed to Gmail), having the DNS service hosted on a different location from your website has one more advantage. In case your hosting server goes down, your DNS will still work and your outside services will still resolve without being affected. 

Seamless Migrations Between Servers 

It’s part of our job to move data around – whether we transfer your account from an old hardware to a newer one, from cPanel server setup to machines with Site Tools setup, or from an old data center to Google Cloud infrastructure, migrations are something that happen and will continue to happen. Every time we migrate servers, one of the biggest challenges is handling the DNS zones. The new server comes with new nameservers and once websites get transferred, the domains have to be pointed to use the new nameservers. We have been updating them automatically for all domains managed via our control panels, but external domains needed manual change by webmasters. In both cases, there would be DNS propagation with potential downtime impact. With the new Centralized DNS it will be much easier to migrate and perform server upgrades in the future. In most of the cases such migrations would not involve any kind of DNS settings change thus preventing any issues caused by propagation. 

More Convenience & Ease of Use for you

With the decentralized DNS, people managing multiple sites on different servers have to keep track of different sets of nameservers, which may be inconvenient. The new centralized DNS simplifies multiple web site management processes for our clients, as all domains of all sites hosted on our platform, regardless of their hosting account or server can now use the same pair of nameservers.

When will the new DNS service become available?

All new websites created on our platform are already using the new DNS service. For older websites, we are now starting a gradual switch to the new centralized DNS. We will be updating nameservers for all domains registered with us automatically. For external domains used with our system, we will be informing our clients by email, confirming when it will be safe to update their DNS settings to the new ones. The old DNS system will continue to be supported for several more months, till the migration to the new one is fully completed. 

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Over the last 6 months, it has been all about speed at SiteGround. We have boosted the performance of the websites hosted with SiteGround up to 5 times by launching the new Ultrafast PHP and MySQL setups and enabling the dynamic cache (full page caching) for all sites. As a next major step in this process, we have turned our attention to our cloud servers and are glad to announce that we rolled out a new dynamic RAM-allocation algorithm that further improves the resource utilization of the MySQL and makes the database-intensive websites hosted on our higher cloud plans run faster. 

What is the problem with MySQL?

MySQL could be a real troublemaker. When left untamed, it devours resources and keeps asking for more. If it doesn’t get what it wants, it starts slowing processes one after the other and turns into a bottleneck for database-driven apps like WordPress. So the MySQL settings are the key to resolving many of the site slow issues reported, but many webmasters have difficulties tracing the origins of the slow performance. It is not just a question of adding more RAM. This RAM should be smartly utilized in a way that allows MySQL to run as fast as possible, but still to be restrained from eating up all the available resources.  

We have been helping clients with evaluating what is an optimal allocation of RAM to the MySQL given the specific services running on the website and the available specs and manually resolving those case by case, but, now we have come up with a way to automate that and diminish the amount of work and expertise required by our clients in the process.

What have we done?

We have implemented a dynamic configuration that depends on the amount of memory your Cloud account has. This means that MySQL settings will be adjusted depending on the available resources. We will not only start new Cloud instances with predefined configurations, but in case of an Automatic Scale event (or upgrade), the server config will adjust itself for optimal resource utilization without manual intervention.  That means that database queries will be processed faster and the I/O usage will be lower. Last, but not least, the additional RAM you add will now be utilized more efficiently, and even fast-growing sites will have to add less of it less often and thus save on their hosting expenses.  

Who Gets It?

The new system is already deployed on all Cloud servers! You don’t need to enable it or otherwise configure it. Just watch out for performance improvements and do let us know your feedback. The more database-intensive your site is (such are, for example, membership sites, online stores, forums, etc.), the bigger the improvement from the change will be!

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Two of the most frequent reasons a site might be slow are unoptimized PHP processes and heavy MySQL queries. Website code optimization is always a crucial part of the constant battle for more website speed. However, webmasters hosting with SiteGround, have always had a reliable ally by their side in this quest.

Recently we have announced the new Ultrafast PHP, which significantly speeds up the processing of PHP scripts and improve the website performance up to 30%. 
As a natural next step in our efforts to offer a premium and superfast service, we deployed a server-side solution to optimise database queries which has already brought down the number of slow queries between 10 and 20 times!

What are slow MySQL queries and why they matter ?

If you are managing an active site with a database, you probably understand that when a visitor enters your site, there are tons of scripts that start running, some of which ask your database for information. For example, if you have an online shop and a visitor is trying to purchase an item, your store should check for its availability in the database and display if it’s possible to be ordered. That check triggers a MySQL query. And depending on how that query is written it may be quite heavy and time-consuming to be processed by the server. For you as a webmaster, these slow queries are a problem because you will be losing clients. You know how visitors drop out of the site when they have to wait longer than 2-3 seconds for a page to load? Well, you get it. For us as your host, we don’t like it when our servers get throttled processing too many slow queries because this means that the CPU and RAM of the machine get blocked and cannot be used for other processes, which are also important for yours and the other websites hosted on the server.

What did we do?

The battle with slow MySQL queries is an ongoing process, which involves both the webmaster and the host. That is why we recently launched a new MySQL setup on our servers, which takes an innovative approach to distributing the server RAM and allocating it to the MySQL. The new setup allows a much higher number of parallel requests to be processed simultaneously and this has a great impact on the effective handling of heavy MySQL queries. So great that the Sys Admins, watching the server load after the new MySQL setup launch, still don’t believe it – they saw a drop in slow queries between 10 and 20 times! 

All of our latest service improvements such as the Ultrafast PHP and now the MySQL setup are possible thanks to two things – the Google Cloud platform and the switch from cPanel to Site Tools. Since moving to Google Cloud, we upgraded our server configurations with more RAM. The RAM unit price is not cheaper, but working in the cloud offers possibilities for better distribution of that resource among different machines. And the fact that we don’t comply with third-party’s software resource requirements such as cPanel, gives us more freedom to innovate. Our DevOps feel empowered to create and keep developing smart technologies that benefit the greater majority of the sites we host spot on!

Who gets it?

Everyone hosted on our shared Site Tools servers already got the new MySQL setup! If you have been seeing an enhancement in the performance for the last week or so, it’s because of the new setup.

That means it’s less likely that you hear from us asking you to fix a slow query and “socially-distancing” your site due to that. Fewer slow queries, faster servers, less hassle for you!

Cloud accounts are also scheduled to receive the new MySQL setup by the end of February, 2021.

Still a SiteGround client on cPanel? We expect to migrate everyone by the end of March 2021 so all you need to do is wait just a little bit longer.

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We are happy to announce that we have deployed and enabled by default the Brotli compression algorithm on our Site Tools servers so websites hosted there could get up to 15-20% speed gains from using it. 

What is Brotli?

Brotli is a next generation compression algorithm developed by Google as a successor to the popular gzip method that we’ve had running on our servers for ages. The idea is simple – once your application produces the HTML output of your website and the output is compressed together with all the resources it loads, the data is transmitted over the Internet and then the browser decompresses the content before rendering it. This process significantly reduces the size of data that’s been moved from the server to the visitor, resulting in speed gains multiple times bigger than the milliseconds lost for compression and decompression.

How much faster is Brotli compared to gzip?

The new algorithm provided by Brotli compresses the website into smaller data size, which makes it faster to transfer. JavaScript files compressed with Brotli are roughly 15% smaller than the ones compressed with gzip. HTML files are around 20% smaller and CSS files get around 16% size reduction. Those numbers of course will differ depending on your particular files.

A test with one of the WordPress’s default themes – TwentyTwenty shows that it produces a 19584 bytes of data uncompressed, 6003 bytes compressed with gzip and only 4863 bytes when compressed with Brotli! This means that you get more than 75% reduction in size from uncompressed content and 19.5% from gzip. 

How to use Brotli?

We have enabled Brotli on all our Site Tools servers and if your account is hosted on one of these, your site will automatically take advantage of it. You don’t have to do anything to get it! 🙂 Browsers that support Brotli compression, which are the majority of the browsers now, pass the appropriate “accept-encoding: br” header when performing the request and get the Brotli-compressed content. Older browsers that don’t support it will be served with gzip-compressed data. If you are still hosted on a cPanel server, don’t worry – we expect migrations to Site Tools to be completed by the end of March 2021 so you won’t have to wait long to get it as well.

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Speed is one of the pillars of our hosting services and wе’re constantly working on making our infrastructure faster and more reliable. One of the essentials for a fast loading speed is the way the PHP is handled on the web server and now, with our new Site Tools platform and without the constraints of the old system, our DevOps team got the opportunity to develop a new and ultrafast PHP setup that is up to 30% faster and as secure as everything we do.

Ultrafast, yet Super Secure PHP Setup

On its own, running a fast PHP is not a difficult task. However, if you want a fast, stable, and secure PHP while supporting Apache and the variety of .htaccess rules defined by users and apps, things get complicated. We wanted to solve these problems and at the same time increase the page loading speed and improve the server stability during traffic spikes. So once we released the new Client area and Site Tools and got rid of major constraints that our old platform was putting on us, modifying our PHP setup became one of the priorities of our DevOps team.  

After several iterations, we managed to overcome the biggest “speed over security” challenge and delivered a fast PHP with our WAF and account isolation integrated, thus getting better performance results without compromising with security. The new implementation is super fast, secure, and efficient.

Our Ultrafast PHP vs Our Standard PHP

While the new, ultrafast PHP setup is faster and is recommended for websites with a lot of traffic, the standard PHP setup provides some extra flexibility for PHP versions and variables management.  

Our Ultrafast PHP – Recommended for Well-visited Sites 

The websites that will benefit most from the ultrafast PHP are those that get solid traffic and may be experiencing resource deficit on the current plan they use. Based on the preliminary statistics we have run, we see the following raw data:

• Faster page response: up to 50% drop in the TTFB (time to first byte), which will make your pages load faster than before.
• Increased server capacity: the host node will be able to process about 20-30% more requests, which means it will be able to handle traffic spikes even better than before. 
• Lower server memory usage: up to 15% drop in the memory usage, which again vacates server resources for handling more of your traffic faster.
• Expected overall performance improvement: currently the new, ultrafast PHP averages at being 30% faster than the old setup.

Note: the numbers above are average and are based on internal tests. Results may vary per site. 

The new PHP setup is available for websites hosted on GrowBig, GoGeek and Cloud plans, as these plans usually host the type of sites that are most likely to benefit from the performance improvements it brings. It’s important to point out that it works for sites running on PHP 7.3 or higher and is not compatible with older versions. Furthermore, when using the ultrafast PHP service, all subdomains under your site will inherit the PHP version and variables settings from the site’s primary domain.

Our Standard PHP Allows Different PHP Settings for Each Subdomain 

The standard PHP setup is the one all StartUp accounts use. It is also available as an alternative to the ultrafast PHP setup on Site Tools-based GrowBig, GoGeek and Cloud accounts. Its performance is excellent for small and standard sites. Its biggest advantage is that it enables you to manage the PHP versions and variables separately for every subdomain in your site. 

As the standard PHP gives more flexibility for experiments, all staging sites are set up with it too. So if you need to use an older PHP than 7.3 or you need a setup with different PHP versions and variables per subdomain, the standard PHP setup is the one for you.

How to Switch to the Ultrafast PHP?

• All new sites created on Site Tools-based GrowBig, GoGeek or Cloud plan come with the new, ultrafast PHP switched on by default. 
• For existing sites hosted on  Site Tools-based GrowBig, GoGeek and Cloud Plans, the ultrafast PHP is now available in Site Tools > PHP Manager and clients can instantly enable it from there. 
• If you are a SiteGround client and have a Site Tools-based StartUp plan, you may upgrade it to a higher plan to get access to the ultrafast PHP setup.

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Starting today we are increasing the resources available to all our new and existing cloud plans with 1CPU Core and 2 GB RAM at no additional cost. The upgrade will make our cloud service faster and more reliable than ever. During the last few months, we have implemented multiple service improvements and the current cloud update is another enhancement made possible by our recent switch to Google Cloud Platform.

More Value With Our Managed Cloud Service on GCP

When we decided to move our infrastructure from bare metal servers to cloud infrastructure, we wanted to get the most out of that switch. We considered all the data redundancy factors, network capabilities, and of course the speed of the new platform compared to the old infrastructure. What was offered by Google Cloud on these parameters was really impressive. We knew that even the mere switch from the previous platform to the new one would result in performance improvements. But what motivated us, even more, to move to Google Cloud Platform were the opportunities we saw to optimize our resource usage, become more efficient and give more value to our clients. The current cloud upgrade is a direct result of the optimization opportunities we have on the new platform. Now our cloud services are not only hosted on a better infrastructure provided by Google Cloud but also receive more resources at the same price as before.  

New Clouds – More Resources at the Old Price

All our cloud offers now come with 1CPU Core and 2 GB RAM more without any change in their current price. Therefore, our entry cloud plan now includes 3CPU cores, 6 GB RAM, and 40 GB space at just 80 USD per month*, which sets the base for any configuration of CPU, RAM, and storage that you wish to create. Additional resource units can be added to this new base at the same prices as before. 

Current Cloud Plans – a Free Upgrade

In the next few days, all our existing cloud users will also receive a free update of their cloud features and will have 1CPU Core and 2 GB RAM added to their existing plan. 

No downtime is expected during this upgrade. However, the option to upgrade or downgrade cloud resources will be temporarily disabled in the Client Area during the upgrade process. Only the Autoscale option will be available to accommodate any urgent need for additional CPU or RAM that may arise during the short period of the feature update. 

* Prices depends on geographical region of the client starting from: 80 USD/mo; 64 EUR/mo; 48 GBP/mo; 80 AUD/mo

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