I've been trying to find an alternative for my current CDN (Rocket CDN), because they don't deliver content well in China. For instance, various partners contacted me last month that our images are no longer visible when visiting our site in China.
Since Azure offers a CDN option for China, I'm looking into their services. I've also looked to Cloudflare, but they seem more expensive when using their 'China Network Acces'. My current website has 1k visitor from china weekly, and 2k from other regions in the world, and we use around 50 gig of data. So I'm not sure what CDN from Azure could solve my problem, because they have one CDN-service focused on China, and one for the rest of the world.
Has anyone faced similar problems? And how did you solve this? My current concerns are: if I chose Azure CDN Worldwide would I still face similar problems; or if I would chose Azure CDN China would other countries face a slow(er) website; or is there an option to combine both services? Or is there another good and affordable service, which I should look in to?
Thank you in advance for tips / help / comment.
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Didn't find a similar question here on SO. There's an old, closed question (2011) on WordPress SE, where page.ly (not free, premium service, hundreds of dollars a month) and WPEngine (also not free, plans start from $25/mo) are mentioned. Any other, free alternatives?
I use Google Cloud to host WordPress, and their Always Free Tier Compute Engine Instance is enough for a small personal site.
It is a little bit more complicated to setup than WPEngine, but the easiest way to host WordPress on Google Cloud is to use a prebuilt image from the Google Cloud Marketplace. I use images created by Bitnami, such as this one: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/bitnami-launchpad/wordpress
On the Configuration page, you will need to adjust the machine size to be "Micro" and make sure the Region is one of the regions mentioned on the Free Tier page.
The estimated cost will say something like $5.13, but if you have everything configured in a way that matches up with the Compute Engine section of the Free Tier page, it will show up on your bill at $0. Of course there are other things Google Cloud may charge you for, such as if you go over the 1GB data transfer limit, but even so your hosting could be pretty inexpensive if your site is not too busy.
i was wondering what Open Street Map tile server to use for a WordPress plugin i am currently working on. I know there is some latency sometimes on the default one and there are some legal stuff that comes to it too. Does anyone have experience on this and could share knowledge? Thanks
The "default" tiles operated by the OSMF are not for heavy use. These servers only have limited capacity and run on donated resources. Using them in a popular WordPress plugin will get you banned very soon. See the tile usage policy for more details.
Alternatives:
Paid-for tile servers
Your own tile server
Does anyone know of any free servers that do a reasonable job of hosting a simple Drupal site? I know of Heliohost but after trying it I found it to be very slow (you get what you pay for clearly), but based on your experience are there any suggestions?
You have to choose either free or Drupal, as it is Ram-greedy beast, you cannot feed it with free social sandwiches.
However, you can try cheap hosting plans, few years ago I used to host about 20 small Drupal sites on a $50/year account.
I'm migrating to an ecommerce platform that would help me sell my products online to a wider user base. I am told Shopify/Zepo is an online shop for small businesses and Magento/woocommerce are solutions. What exactly is the difference between a "shop" and "solution"? Or what if I build a site from scratch? Where do I start from?
Shopify/Zepo are SaaS ecommerce platforms which can handle milions of visits/transactions per day if your store is a real success.
Magento/woocommerce are 'own hosted' tools/platforms.
Both are ok to start with, but if you think you'll do good, be careful on the last ones. They might seem cheap at the beginning but they can eventually ruin your business.
When starting it's always wiser to start with a SaaS tool which has no upfront costs and allow you to download all your data (products, customers, orders) in case you want to move to another platform.
Starting with Magento or WooCommerce will force you to have a sys team or a web developer almost permanently doing server-packages updates and so, let alone security, performance and scalability issues.
I do not believe using an off-the-shelf SAAS alone will ever be enough for a successful ecommerce website.
If you want to have a successful ecommerce solution you will need at least a good web developer to keep your site up-to-date.
Moreover, there will be many opportunities such as integration with your back-end systems that an off-the-shelf SAAS might not be able to handle.
My advice is to find a good technical resource, even if it's just one web developer, and build your product together - invariably it's more about people than technology or platform.
I'm currently developing an application for the emergency services (target market is NY) A crucial part of the application is the mapping feature. I'm currently using Google maps API and Bing, as a proof of concept, and it's working great. I like google a lot better as it seems to have more features and looks better. I've been finding that sometimes google is inaccurate about 10-20% of the time (Bing is also inaccurate, but not as much). It's working for a proof of concept, but as this is for emergency services, I need the maps to be as accurate as possible. I wouldn't have a problem using one API to geocode, and then use google to display. Does anyone know a good geocoding service out there that could live up to these standards? (Free would be best, but I'd take fee based services suggestions too)
Thanks!
For something like this you really want to pay someone and get support, corrections, fixes etc on demand. Mapquest might have an offering that suits you (and their geocoding is generally very good).