Kinsta Blog

While it doesn't seem very popular in Hacker News, I think WordPress [1] is an excellent platform for a blog. The community is terrific, there is a tremendous amount of documentation out there, and it is entirely customisable. If you go with the managed hosting route, most companies handle security and updates for you, so you can focus on writing and leave everything technical to someone else. I am working on one myself — and have a private beta running, if you are interested [2], —, but of the top of my head, some companies that will go above and beyond as far as WordPress is concerned, include Kinsta [3], Pantheon [4] and Presslabs [5]. The last one is based in Romania and open sourced a bunch of their stack, worth checking out. [1] https://wordpress.org [2] Just email me at [email protected] for information [3] https://kinsta.com [4] https://pantheon.io [5] https://www.presslabs.com

Kinsta | Senior Support Engineer | Full-time | REMOTE | https://kinsta.com/ Kinsta is a modern cloud hosting startup focused on WordPress hosting. Our awesome, young, and motivated team is scattered across the globe: Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. Our client base is growing steadily and we’re looking for a competent support engineer with exceptional communication skills who can provide enterprise level technical support to our customers via our support system. Our Support Engineers must know WordPress deeply. All we host is WordPress and we have the best support team in the business (even if we do say so ourselves). While you don't have to be a full-fledged WordPress developer to be a Kinsta Support Engineer, you do need to know the WordPress database and file/directory structure as well as the wp-config.php file like the back of your hand. A basic understanding of or familiarity with the following technologies is also a must: Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DNS, CDN, and caching (object and page). This is a fully-remote role. Our Support Engineers can work from anywhere they have reliable Internet access. We always use the latest version of everything: PHP 7.2, NGINX, Ubuntu 18.04, Linux containers, Google Cloud and more, so you’ll be able to work with a bunch of exciting technologies and use them every day! This position offers a great deal of flexibility, responsibility, competitive salary, and opportunity for growth for the…

Poetry helps alleviate some of the issues mentioned here, and lets you separate dev vs prod dependencies. As far as the "new PHP" goes, it'd be great if Python ever powered almost 80% of websites: https://kinsta.com/blog/is-php-dead/

If I were in your shoes, I'd move to Kinsta[0], Pressable[1], or some other reputable managed WordPress host. Most hosting providers should have pricing between $50 and $100/month for a site with that amount of traffic. If you want to save some money, you might go with SpinupWP[2] and hook that up to a VPS. It's a bit more sysadmin-ish than managed hosting, but performs very well. [0] https://kinsta.com/ [1] https://pressable.com/ Disclosure: I work for their parent company, Automattic. [2] https://spinupwp.com/

I think the issue is that the video files are being hosted on the server so that greatly increases the load that's being consumed for each pageview. If you host the videos on something like youtube or dailymotion and then embed them it will take the load off your server. Just keep the originals in case they get taken down so you can switch to a different service. Hope this helps! Feel free to PM me if you need assistance. Some options here: https://kinsta.com/blog/video-hosting/

Any look at the WP ecosystem from top hosts ( https://cloudconfusing.com/2019/09/16/wp-engine-review/ ) to investment like this, to adoption ( https://kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/ ) will reveal how the platform is poised for even greater success.

Never thought of using a third-party relay SMTP server. That's a great idea. Gmail has a relay [0][1], but I'm not sure if it's still free now that the G Suite free tier is gone. Amazon SES [2] has competitive pricing, or it's free (first 62,000 emails per month) if you're using EC2 for sending email. Then there's a bunch of marketing oriented SMTP providers that have free tiers. E.g. mailjet [3]. [0] https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/free-smtp-server/ [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/2956491?hl=en [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/ [3] https://www.mailjet.com/pricing/

Thanks to pressure from HHVM I assume. Nothing was happening in the PHP language for freaking three years. To be fair the benchmarks usually take a wordpress or drupal installation and do a requests per second measurement, which IMO is a real world benchmark. No hate, I just don't get why hhvm doesn't get any love for what they did. Maybe because from HPHPc to HHVM they seriously gave the PHPc a competition and people kind of got mad. https://kinsta.com/blog/the-definitive-php-7-final-version-hhvm-benchm…

7 brought a huge speed boost. (typically 100% or more without any code change required). Not specific to 7, but 2 things I think have helped a lot are: * PSR standards * composer packaging Initial PSR work helped define some package interop standards. I'm not sure how useful ongoing PSR work today is (no doubt there's some incremental benefits?). Composer is a great package manager, and helped usher in a lot more sharing/reusability of common components. Laravel bundles a number of Symfony components, for example (many frameworks do). The speed alone in 7 was big, and we've seen some more incremental improvments in 8 and 8.1 and 8.2. It's hard to find current benchmarking tools that compare the 5 series with 7 and 8. I found one showing 5->7 on a mandelbrot run. * PHP 5.0 was 251s * PHP 5.1 was 87s * PHP 5.6 was 29s * PHP 7.0 was 15s * PHP 7.1 was 9s The 'experimental JIT' work (at that time) yielded 4s. That benchmark was from 2016, so... way out of date now, but other numbers I've seen were 7.1->7.4 was another ... 10% improvement on average, and depending on workload, you might see another 10-20% improvement from 7.4->8.0. Kinsta has some interesting useful benchmarks on 'real world' apps https://kinsta.com/blog/php-benchmarks Been using PHP since 1996, and ecosystem, community, performance all continuously improve year over year.

Other people have recommended getting into support, and it really is a good option to consider. A lot of the suggestions here are a bit more long term. There are entry level support jobs in tech that will give you valuable experience, _now_, for a pathway to engineering roles. Many companies will also give you a budget to buy courses, books, conference tickets, etc. Staying in support isn't a dead end, anymore, either. Remote companies will try to pay you based on location, but salaries can get very high once you stack up experience (120k+/year). Regardless of future plans, you'll have an advantage over trying to learn while doing unrelated work. Here are a few listings as an example: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/happiness-engineer/ https://kinsta.com/careers/ https://www.dropbox.com/jobs/listing/2603610 https://system76.com/careers If you want to talk more about it, lmk, and I'll email you.

WordPress is not without its design flaws, some of which make sense from the point of view of helping non-techies run their own sites (such as making updates easy.) But as someone who has built 100s of sites with WordPress I feel the need to defend it on a few points here: > You have to let it modify its install. Security-fucking-nightmare. You don't have to do this, you can set up sane permissions and use the wp cli[0] tool to install updates manually. I prefer to version sites with git and install updates locally, then git pull down on to the live server. > It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs (which can include self-upgrades), via a non-loopback HTTP request. A good practice is to set up your own cron job[1] on the server and disable the internal cron in your wp-config.php, like this: define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true); Again this is a decision I imagine was made to support shared hosting environments. They've made it easy for 99% of users, which is why it's so popular. We the remaining 1% who prefer to use real cron can edit the config. > It falls apart under any kind of load, both because of unoptimized DB queries, and because of PHP. You have to put a cache in front of it to be able to handle getting on HN, let alone Reddit. Just install a page caching plugin of your choice[2] > You really have to dedicate an admin to it if you want to keep it secure and performant. I still get angry remembering my experience installing, securing, and setting up…

"old days of PHP and Apache" ... Apache still runs about 23-28% of websites (with some measurements suggesting it is pretty close to equal with nginx). PHP is still in use by 70-80% of websites (numbers vary depending on where you look). You make it sound like both pieces of tech are irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. some quick googled examples (like I said other sites' numbers vary, but you get the general idea): https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/web-servers/ https://kinsta.com/php-market-share/

An Introduction to IP Spoofing (and How to Prevent It) https://kinsta.com/blog/ip-spoofing/

Hi from the other thread :P If you'll forgive me putting my debugging hat on for a bit, because solving problems is what most if us do here, I wonder if it's not actually reading the URL, and maybe that's the source of the problem, bc I've had a lot of success feeding manuals and such to AIs and then asking it to synthesize commands or asking it questions about them. Also, I just tried asking Gemini 2.5 Flash this and it did a web search, found a source, answered my question correctly (ls -a, or -la for more detail), and linked me to the precise part of its source it referenced: https://kinsta.com/blog/show-hidden-files/#:~:text=If%20you're%20n… (this is the precise link it gave me).

It's so dead that 79.2% of all websites rely on PHP to some degree. https://kinsta.com/php-market-share/

It's strange death when the WP market share is at over 40% of all websites [1] and still growing (though slowly). Lots of people might not like it, but saying it's dying is more of a wish than a fact. [1] https://kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/

That cookbook article is a bad example, especially for normal users, since instead of explaining idiomatic cases of iteration, it explains several iteration constructs (where some are extremely complex) in one article: loop, iterate, for, mapcar, series, transducers Built-in, of those above, are mapcar and loop. Python iteration isn't so much about ranges, I thought. See: https://kinsta.com/blog/iterables-in-python/

pnpm is 3x slower or even more https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:832/1*noWyIXw-yeNZq5Db2r8tOQ.png https://kinsta.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/bun-benchmark.png And for running scripts, it's not even close https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/1*oyPEXsFfZsTg4mOBSIJL_A.pn…

Good question! Chrome has 77% market share across desktop operating systems & Safari has 8%: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/ OSX has 16% market share which would indicate thar its somewhere ~around 50% of OSX users using Safari: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide The inference being made here of course that all the remaining people not using Safari are using Chrome which is or course not true; but it shows somewhat the fragility of the incumbent software: as Safari is actually quite good for users, chrome has very few feature advantages compared.

Given that Cloudflare has ~80% of the CDN marketshare and ~20% of the total web marketshare, their push for PAT will lead to users effectively being locked out of a lot of online services if they do not pass the Blessed Test aka have modified their device in any way that The Gods have not determined to be acceptable. It's bad enough on mobile - try banking apps, Netflix, Google Pay, Samsung's Watch companion app or pretty much any game on a rooted Android, you'll have to bytecode patch your way around. I do not want that crap on desktop as well. [1] https://kinsta.com/cloudflare-market-share/

There's no legal precedent yet, but WordPress plugins/themes are widely considered as being GPL because they're a "derivative" work. Or, at least the PHP code in those plugins/themes are - possibly not the CSS + assets. https://kinsta.com/learn/wordpress-gpl/

The majority of the world is still using Google to search the web [0], including high school students (let's also think about high school students outside of North America). [0] Sources: - https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-s… - https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share - https://kinsta.com/search-engine-market-share/

Laravel gets over 2000 requests per second in PHP 8.1 https://kinsta.com/blog/php-benchmarks/

Stats vary a lot by source, for example[1] puts FF and Safari neck and neck (which seems optimistic to me, as much as I like FF). 1: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/

May conflict with the wordpress php function is_email(). [1] According to W3Techs, WordPress powers 43% of all the websites on the Internet, including those without a content management system (CMS) or with a custom-coded CMS. Or to put it another way, WordPress powers over one-third of the web! And if you limit the data set to only websites with a known CMS, WordPress’ market share gets even more dominant. In that case, WordPress holds a 65% market share for content management systems on websites with a known CMS. [1] https://kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/

PHP is an insignificant, declining language outside of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. Those three combined are ~90% of all sites running PHP[1]. I'd wager that most of the remaining PHP sites are wikis and legacy applications that are too painful to port. 1. https://kinsta.com/php-market-share/

“mobile devices have overtaken desktop computers in web traffic, and there’s no turning back” https://kinsta.com/mobile-vs-desktop-market-share/

https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/error-1020-access-denied/ says it's a Cloudflare message. FWIW, I can read it without a problem.

Where are you finding those numbers? Most global browser share numbers I could find bundled Brave into the "Other" category - this was the only one I found that broke it out separately: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/

If I read https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/ correctly, the global market share of browsers is 77% Google Chrome. Safari only makes up 8.87% of the global share (and Firefox is 7.69%). From a mobile perspective and limited to the US - https://www.statista.com/statistics/272664/market-share-held-by-mobile… Safari makes up only 54.87% of the mobile browser market and chrome makes up another 38.95%. Another set of graphs - https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share Even if every safari user switched (desktop and mobile), it still wouldn't do much more than double the marketshare and yet remain a small fraction of what Chrome has. I find it difficult to say that iPhone safari is the reason that Firefox is having trouble when overall, iPhone safari has less of an overall market share than Firefox currently has.