Partnership with CloudFlare

2020Media.com is happy to announce a new partnership with CloudFlare, the web’s easiest performance and security solution. As a CloudFlare Optimised  Partner, we deliver their simple and effective solution to help protect and accelerate your website. Once your website joins the CloudFlare community, it loads twice as fast and is protected from a range of online threats.

To learn more about CloudFlare, you can watch the introductory video

We are delighted to offer this great service to you and help make your website faster and safer.

CloudFlare Railgun

As a CloudFlare Optimized Partner, we are delighted to offer the CloudFlare Railgun™ technology to all our customers as an upgrade option. Railgun is CloudFlare’s latest performance optimization technology that gives you significant improvements in site load times.

Railgun ensures that the connection between our network and the CloudFlare network is as fast as possible. Railgun achieves a 99.6% compression ratio for previously uncacheable web objects by using techniques similar to those used in the compression of high-quality video. The average website can expect a 1.43x performance increase.

Although the dynamic web is not cacheable, it is also not changing quickly. That means that from moment to moment there’s only a small change between versions of a page. CloudFlare Railgun uses this fact to achieve very high rates of compression. This is very similar to how video compression looks for changes from frame to frame; Railgun looks for changes on a page from download to download.

We have made it simple for our customers to get the benefits of Railgun – contact your account manager and ask for a free trial.

Improvements to Managed WordPress

2020Media is delighted to announce new features to their Managed WordPress hosting plans.

Global CDN Performance and DDOS protection

  • As a hosting partner for CloudFlare, we are delighted to offer the benefits of their free global CDN plan to all our Managed WordPress customers.
  • Websites load twice as fast on an international CDN and use 60% less bandwidh.
  • Cloudflare also blocks thousands of malware, DDOS  attacks.
  • “Railgun” an optional add-on for even more performance.
  • WordPress database optimisation done automatically to keep WordPress fast.
Cloudflare Distributed Performance and Security

Managed WordPress Backups

  • We efficiently auto-backup only the changes every 24 hours.
  • Your sites are safely backed up to Google Drive, Amazon S3 or Dropbox.
  • Stage an update to check integrity before making the changes live.
  • With smart update detection techniques, we automagically detect security updates and apply them on your WordPress sites.

Updates with complete Peace of Mind

  • Automatically backs up your WP site whenever an update takes place, be it an auto or a manual update.
  • Automatically checks your site after every update and notifies us in case of a bad update so that we can restore your site.
  • We can restore a specific file or an entire site or just the database. We can also restore your website even if it’s down or deleted.

Security Features

  • Regular security scans against the complete site.
  • Advanced bot blocking technology locks out intruders without compromising performance.
  • Alerts from Google Search Engine Console reports any problems with your site that might affect it’s search engine ranking.
  • Sucuri Malware scans to root out malware.
Your WordPress watchdog

Summary

“The 2020Media Managed WordPress service keeps on getting better and better” … Richard Clarke

If you’re looking for a faster, safer website, you’ve got a good start with 2020Media.  Contact us on 0370 321 2020 or email sales@2020media.com

Spammers Stole My Bandwidth

This is a guest post from 2020Media customer Andy C. He writes:

The other morning I had an automated email from 2020media advising I was nearing my bandwidth quota. So I went over to google analytics to see if there had been a sudden surge of interest in the site. There was no real change so I knew I’d need to investigate further.

I also had a look at my spam numbers as spammers had previously been a bandwidth cause. However, there were only a handful of comments needing approval and the numbers that had been sent directly to spam were quite small too.

Rex from 2020media recommended looking at the webalizer web stats provided by the site, these are driven directly from the Apache server and are used by the bandwidth monitor. The numbers here are hence a more accurate reflection of bandwidth use. I logged into the FTP server and downloaded the logs to analyse off-line.

The monthly summary did not give any clues so I drilled into the details for March. The problem was highlighted both in the form of the graph and big numbers that had been pulled in over the weekend of 11th and 12th.

Looking further down the report I could see that the big numbers were for the home page (not much of a surprise) and for the comment subscription page which is the landing page when people save a comment.

Comment subscription page

Further down the report I could see the culprits, a couple of IP addresses that were pulling a lot of Kbytes.

IP addresses that were pulling a lot of Kbytes.

I’ve added those to my blacklist so that should keep them at bay. I’ll also be pro-actively monitoring my Bandwidth Gem to make sure they’ve not come back.

Many thanks Andy.

Starting From Scratch: How to Generate Traffic For a New Site

Starting a new site is equal parts exciting and dreadful. The latter is because making a site successful takes a lot of effort and you can’t always be sure it will get there.

After all, building an audience is not done overnight. At the same time, it’s also not rocket science but something that has been done countless times.

Read More: Starting From Scratch: How to Generate Traffic For a New WordPress Site

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