edgecast
Newsroom

Improving Hosting Experience at ZNetLive (1) – Website Speed

4 Mins read

Our technical team has been working on multiple factors of late to improve your hosting experience. Two areas that have been of prime focus to us are – Speed and Security.

In this post, we’ll cover technical implementations on our servers that greatly improve the speed of websites hosted. But before that, let’s understand – why is it important that your website loads as fast as possible?

Why is it important that your website loads fast?

You created a content-rich, informative, engaging and instantly likable site. You are paying a premium amount for hosting it on a server with 100% uptime. Everything seems to be rosy and perfect.

But when visitors visit your site, they have to wait for many minutes before the website files load and its content is finally visible. How long do you think your visitors will last?

Researches have concluded that customers cannot wait for more than 2-3 seconds for a website to load and are put off by long loading times.

Speed of your website may seem like a very negligible entity but in reality, it directly affects a number of metrics, including page views, search ranking, bounce rates and importantly reader satisfaction, retention, and conversion.

In 2010, Google also included ‘site speed’ as a new signal in its search ranking algorithms, making it explicit that website speed matters! Faster load times translate to higher search rankings and these convert to more traffic to your site.

Improving your website speed by hosting optimization

ZNetLive has installed two new caching mechanisms on its servers- Implementing Google’s mod_pagespeed and SSD Caching.

#1 SSD Caching

ZNetLive recently added 120GB SSD caching to all its shared hosting servers, VPS and dedicated servers. SSDs are many times faster than hard disks, but they are much more costly for the storage space.

We use the SSD drives (rather than a traditional HDD) to cache and store a second copy of most commonly accessed data of your website/application so that your website’s cached data is loaded much faster than if it had to be directly from the hard drive.

What is SSD caching?

SSD Caching is a proprietary caching technology that uses cache or stores commonly accessed data of a website/application. SSD caching combines conventional mechanical HDDs and SSDs and bridges the gap between the two.

It continuously tracks data writes and reads operations on a standard hard drive and caches the data that is accessed most frequently to a faster low capacity solid-state drive cache.

Thus, servers that use normal HDD for main storage also benefit from SSD like performance and faster access.

Behind the Scenes

In order to understand the modus-operandi of SSD caching, one needs to understand what goes behind the scene when a visitor is trying to find the data he needs on the server your website is hosted at.

Also Read: What is Digital Information Security in Healthcare Act (DISHA) in India?

When a program is first run, all of the different files needed to launch that program are read from the hard drive and loaded into the different levels of temporary storage found on a server. On most servers, the basic hierarchy goes:

SSD1

Whenever a server needs to find data, it goes through this hierarchy of different storage locations starting with the CPU cache and working all the way back to the hard drive.

AI-powered Backup Solution

Unmatched Backup Features from Future

As you go through the list, the speed of the storage gets slower so ideally, you want the most commonly accessed data higher up on the list.

For example, reading data from the CPU cache is much faster than reading from the RAM, which itself is much faster than reading directly from the hard drive. SSD caching adds an extra step between the RAM and hard drive, so this process becomes:

SSD2

Since SSD drives are much faster than traditional hard drives, this gives the system one more place to look for data before having to read from the comparatively slow hard drive.

To measure the operational efficiency of SSD caching, ZNetLive performed the testing of SSD Cached servers versus traditional servers in live environment.

The SSD caching solution decreased page load times on average by 36% across all of our test nodes!

The details of the results can see this whitepaper on our website.

#2 Google’s MOD_PAGESPEED

ZNetLive has recently installed automatic caching provided by Google’s PageSpeed module on its shared and reseller web hosting servers.

This module developed by Google developers speeds your site up and decreases the page load time by improving bandwidth usage and web page latency by applying web performance best practices to your webpages and optimizing its CSS, images, JavaScript, etc. without the need to improve the existing content.

How does PageSpeed speed up your web-sites?

In PageSpeed, all optimizations are executed as a custom filter, which is carried out when the website assets are served by the HTTP server.

Many filters vary the HTML content simply, whereas other filters modify references to JavaScript, CSS or images for pointing to increasingly optimized versions.

Also Read: How is Data Transforming Healthcare in India?

PageSpeed leverages custom optimization strategies for all those assets that are referenced by the website, in order to make them smaller, so as to decrease the loading time, and enhance each asset’s cache life-term.

These optimizations combine and minimize CSS and JavaScript files, inlining small resources, and many others.

Also, it optimizes images dynamically by eliminating unutilized meta-data from all files, images are resized as per specific dimensions, and re-encoded images are presented to the user in the most effective format available.

PageSpeed provides various advanced filters that site owners can turn on for gaining higher improvements in performance.

AI-powered Backup Solution

Unmatched Backup Features from Future

PageSpeed comes with a fixed set of core filters that are designed to safely optimizing the content of the user’s site without changing its behavior or looks.

In order to learn more about PageSpeed, watch this video:

Several more technological advancements on our servers are underway, and we shall keep you posted as and when they happen 🙂

AI-powered Backup Solution

Unmatched Backup Features from Future

Please use the comments section below for queries.

Note – This post is part of a series post on ZNetLive’s Hosting Experience. Part 2, 3 and 4 will be made live soon and will deal with our Security implementation, Enterprise-grade hardware and Value Added Services that come free with our web hosting.

Update 1 – Part 2 is now live.

Update 2Part 3 is now live.

Update3Part4 is now live.

Services ZNetLive offers:

Buy Domain Names

Shared Hosting

WordPress Hosting

VPS Hosting

Dedicated Server

73 posts

About author
Jyotsana Gupta - the content and communication head, is an engineer by education and a writer at heart. In technical writing for 11 years, she makes complex topics interesting to the general audience. She loves going on long drives in her spare time.
Articles
Related posts
Newsroom

Team ZNetLive visits Plesk APAC Partner Day 2019 in Singapore

4 Mins read
ZNetLive team attended Plesk APAC partner day on October 11, 2019 at Suntec Convention & Exhibition Centre in Singapore. The exclusive conference…
Newsroom

Plesk Onyx latest version 17.8 loaded with new Plesk Onyx features for performance, WordPress, SEO, Security and Cloud integration

3 Mins read
What is Plesk Onyx? Plesk is a leading WebOps and web hosting platform that provides a comprehensive set of technical, security and…
AWSNewsroom

ZNetLive expands AWS relationship and becomes an AWS Channel Reseller Partner

2 Mins read
We are proud to announce that we have become an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Channel Reseller Partner, building on our long-term experience…

2 Comments