Just yesterday I was pulled into a Teams call by a coworker. He was trying to help some Local IT Ops Technicians bring a printer online. I read through the notes in the Incident and got brought up to speed with the current troubleshooting efforts. Pretty quickly after verifying the MAC address of the attached printer I was able to advise that the IP space that is mapped static is incorrect for the printer vlan. My coworker thanked me for my help and mentioned that he appreciated by troubleshooting approach. This got me thinking….
Around the same time yesterday I was scrolling through the internet I came across an advertisement for Linode. Full disclosure, I pay for their service and I’d like to leverage the referral program. Regardless I gave this advertisement a watch. It resonated with me, and in an attempt to get out of my depressive state; Let me tell you why I am qualified to sell you high quality web hosting. Let me show you what I am already doing for myself, for fun.
Responsive, Front to Back
This blog is actually running on my Starter Plan. Hosted on Linode; It has a 20GB SSD and is attached to a beefy AMD EYPC 7113 processor. Running OpenLiteSpeed as the back-end web server offers fantastic nginx-esq performance and CDN integration. This helps contribute to my servers overall responsiveness. See my current GTmetrix scores and PageSpeeds Insights below. My web server based in Fremont, California is able to fully render within 0.3 seconds in Vancouver, Canada.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights speak a similar story.
Modern, Secure, QUIC
If you know a bit about networking, you are probably familiar with the difference between TCP and UDP traffic. If you don’t; allow me to teach you in the form of a joke!
“I’d tell you a joke about TCP, but I’d have to repeat myself until you get it.”
“I’d tell you a joke about UDP, but you might not get it.”
Great! Now just know that most HTTP/2 traffic is TLS over TCP. Transport Layer Security being the protocol used to securely transmit data. Reducing the processing overhead is achieved with TLS over UDP. These secure, redundant, and performant data streams is what makes QUIC so fascinating. Long story short, all my customers get HTTP/3 QUIC and all underlying protocols enabled by default!
Additionally my servers are locked down behind a strict set of firewall rules limiting inbound and outbound traffic for reduced Layer 3 attack vectors. These same settings are reinforced at the OS. Layer 7 protection is integrated with BlueBotCDN.
Anycast You Can See!
My BlueBotDNS authoritative Name Servers ride on the massive Akamai network. Pairing their DNS with QUIC.cloud CDN has proven to myself to be quick and an effective caching network packaged together I call BlueBotCDN. This can be reliability implemented for all my customers. I can even provide monthly analytics on PoP utilization.
Internal Latency Testing
Below is a 24 hour graph showing the time delta for HTTP requests initiated from a Raspberry Pi in my home towards my servers IP. Ignoring the CDN/DNS component. We can see an average latency of 687ms. This might seem rather high but it is just a tad over 1/2 a second. This is well within an acceptable user experience.
Now that you have seen the direct latency, check out what happens when we leverage our Content Delivery Network. If you look below you can see that we are able to perform the same HTTP request on average of 267ms. This is a 39% reduction in HTTP load times!
My Conclusion
I might be biased, but I think my plans offer value even if the initial setup process is rather involved. It’s a fun challenge for myself to spend time learning and optimizing my services in-depth. Give me the chance to grow with you. Let me help you build something.
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