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UPDATE: it turns out that AWS as well throttles port 25 in case many emails are sent at once (like is usually the case when sending out newsletters). You can ask AWS support to lift that throttle though...
A while back I was very excited about Google Cloud. Remember? Well, it’s over. Google Cloud Servers block outgoing port 25, meaning that you cannot run an SMTP service on that port. So there is absolutely no way to host websites (with contact forms, or any other forms) on a Google Cloud server. Exit Google Cloud.
So I had to go find another solution. I decided to give Amazon Web Services a try. Check out https://aws.amazon.com/
So far so good. I’m very impressed. Things are a bit more complex coming from Google Cloud, but that has its reasons. AWS has a longer tradition in cloud hosting. It feels like they have been thinking a lot about it over the years. They do cloud hosting the object oriënted way... Sort of.
Some things to keep in mind when using AWS:
- Make sure to use one the datacenters that has AWS backup available. At this time it’s only available to 4 of the many datacenters they have. I choose Ireland.
- You can make use of their so called “Free Tier” offers. That basically means you pay nothing in the first 12 months. Google has something similar. You can have a Windows 2019 with 30GB of disk space and 1GB of RAM for free… That sounds like a ridiculously small server, but believe me, it works very well. You can easily host up to 30 (small) QuickerSites on such an instance. Not bad at all. After the free period has expired, that server would only cost at around 15€/month. Not bad either. And of course, you can easily upgrade that machine with more CPU, RAM and disk space any time.
- The AWS backup solution fully automates the creation of snapshots (backups) at very low rates. Very useful, but again, only available to a handful of their datacenters…
- Getting started with such an AWS instance requires some in-depth understanding of how firewalls work, how to install IIS, an SMTP server, assign IP addresses, and many other things… Sometimes I feel like it’s too much for my small brains. But I managed to get it up and running rather quickly. I amazed myself.
- It’s good to know that QuickerSite works – without a single problem – on the latest Windows 2019 Server. It’s funny to read how some ASP.NET applications are stuck with IIS 6 or 7 due to lacking support for older ASP.NET versions on the newer IIS releases. Véééry funny actually. I can tell for sure that QuickerSite runs on - hold on - Windows 2000 (IIS5), 2003 (IIS6), 2008 (IIS7), 2012 (IIS8), 2016 (IIS10) and 2019 (also IIS10 - huh? they forgot to make it 11 I guess) servers. Bam...
All in all, I think AWS is a very interesting way to go. I will make up my mind about it very soon.
03/05/2019 12:04:05 | Pieter | Login | Replies (14)
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (20/03/2019 22:19:11)Interesting topic, which leads me to one question:
By choosing Ireland, while your business is in another country - Belgium, isn't that going to affect your SEO, or even worse, maybe even getting blackballed (flagged as suspicious) in the future?
Things are getting more complicated all around...
On another note, I'm playing with NicePage (thanks to Pieter's generosity). It is one of the better page builders I've used, and I have usedover 10-15 of them through the years, and I almost bought a full pledge license myself. What stopped me? It is very buggy. Very often, what you design in the backsite, is not exactly displayed on the front end (WordPress plugin-wise). But what really cooled me off was the fact that initially it did not add any page load times, but after an update about 2 weeks ago, it started adding about 0.4 - 0.5 seconds per page load. Now, CMS's like QS do not have that many choices for a page builder (Mobirise and NicePage) only come to mind. In WordPress there are dozens of options to choose, so the cost, bugs, and load times does not make NicePage worth while. Add the fact that if their server goes down, you can't even edit anything, NicePage makes it a very risky proposition to be used in a serious business environment. I have not experienced any outages yet, but many have reported in the Themler forums, some that lasted 2-3 days, and my guess is that they are using the same servers. Also, many of the bugs are around responsive issues, and their answer to those is to turn the "responsive problematic items" off for the smaller devices - not good enough. NicePage is work in progress, but I have no trust in the company behind it. They started with Artisteer, run into problems, and started themler, run into issues there, and now started NicePage. How long will this last before they abandon it and started something new?
Sorry to sort of hijacking your topic Pieter...
- Pieter says: (20/03/2019 22:39:47)Nick, nearly half of the sites I host are for UK customers. Well, even though Ireland and the UK are often fighting eachother, I don't think this will affect SEO. Actually, I am an SEO non-believer. Create a Google business and make sure to have lots of photo's for it, and a Google map entry. Try to get some true and useful Google reviews. It's the best SEO you can have...
Nicepage is an amazing software. But I would never use it with WP. Actually I would never use WP.
Seriously though, I would never want to rely on a 3rd party for any module, other than Google web fonts or CDN.
Nicepage also exports *just* flat html/css-only websites. Those are very interesting and could be used as templates in QuickerSite. But I have given up on that for now. I decided to focus on www.jstemplates.com. Actually, YOU told me to do so, and you were right. It was worth it. JStemplates is currently hosted on a free Amazon server in Ireland btw ;) On a free SSL certificate by Let's Encrypt. I like free... ;) - Pieter says: (25/03/2019 11:08:50)Nick, now we're at it, I have a couple of questions about NP and WP.
1. In order to use NP in WP, the only thing you have to do is upload a bare-minimal template/plugin to your WP site isn't? You can edit the pages in WP, and things like colors, menu, SEO (etc) in the theme customizer... right?
2. I face a blocking issue: when setting a password for a given page (made with NP) in WP, the page shows without asking for a password... Can you confirm that issue? It's quite annoying obviously. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
3. I really need secure downloads, so that files cannot be downloaded by anonymous visitors or web bots. I need a plugin for that, right? - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (25/03/2019 17:19:59)1. Almost true... what you can do in the customizer, which is the short name for THEME Customizer, depends what that particular theme is coded to allow you to do, except some of the core features. For example you can set the menus and widgets, but you can only set the colors and SEO if the theme is coded to do so, So each theme has different Customizer screens, and the premium themes over the free ones, obviously will normally have way more controls. My themes will almost reconfigure all aspects of Artisteer, so for small things, like colors, positioning media query breakpoints, you don't need Artisteer to adjust those values, they can be done on the fly.,.
2. I don't have access to Nicepage on this computer, but I will in 3 hours and I will post back then, but I tested on a regular page, and the password pages according to plan - all good.
3. To begin with I would not recommend using password protected pages to push downloads. You will run into some issues in the future. Let's say you have given the password to 1,000 people, and a week later you have to ban a user from the downloads page. You will have to change the password for that page and notify the rest 999 of them for the new password. At this point, if I'm one of the 999 people, I would start swearing at you like a drunken sailor...
Instead, you need a plugin, or a simple shortcode which I can provide you if you want, to display any section of the page that you want ONLY for logged in users, and if you further want more control, a second shortcode to display any section of a page only to logged out visitors. So if you want to ban a person in the future, all you have to do is go to the users screen and disable that user, or disable him, without affecting the other 999 of them in any way... There are more sophisticated plugins, that not only can target logged in/out users, but user groups, like Admins, Editors, etc..., or individual users, by user ID, etc... the possibilities are endless, you have to determine how complicated you want to make things. I would recommend a simple code snippet to create the one or two simple shortcodes, and display your downloads only to logged in users, and if you want some information only to logged out users... Let me know, the soonest I can respond will be about 3 hours from now... - Pieter says: (25/03/2019 17:24:10)I get the point about the logged-on users instead of simple passwords. I will look into that solution first then.
But not only the pages where the file-downloads are available should be protected, also the links to the downloads should be.
So a link like www.mywp.com/secure.pdf should not work for anonymous visitors or web bots, and work for logged on users. I'm not sure that is supported out of the box. Actually, it's not supported in QS either, but I can see how this would be a very useful addition to QS. - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (25/03/2019 22:12:13)Ok, I'm back...
I can confirm that password protecting a NicePage does NOT work. This is another bug found in NicePage. If you password a non NicePage page, things will work.
I very quickly created a QS branded plugin, to display content to guests only, or to members only.
Here is a silent video how to install and activate the plugin, and how to use it in Gutenberg by using the "Classic" block, and how to use it in a NicePage. As you can see, the plugin will do EXACTLY what you want to do. Because of time constrains I did not create the tinymce buttons to generate the shortcodes for you, but because the shortcodes are easy to use, there are only 2 of them, and none of them contain and parameters...
Use of the shortcodes:
[qs-members]content[/qs-members]
[qs-guests]content[/qs-guests]
Watch this video for more clarity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIYBI0KjCjs&feature=youtu.be
I'll have way more things tomorrow... I will show you how very quickly and easily you can exponentially make the jstemplates better and more professional. - Pieter says: (25/03/2019 22:24:35)Many thanks Nick. I take a closer look tomorrow. Meantime my brother (who is a complete website noob) created his first WP with Nicepage: https://www.anesthesie-imelda.be - he did everything himself...
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (25/03/2019 22:31:32)Bottom line Pieter, password protecting NicePages, IS NOT POSSIBLE, simply because NicePage sucks !. If you want to password protect pages, then don't use NicePage for those purposes - which I don't recommend, and I explained why.
That said, you can use the shortcodes that I provided you, and use it to protect any part of a page, Nicepage or not, in fact you can protect multiple parts of pages, because you can have multiple instances of these shortcodes. This is one example how to utilize these shortcodes, another one is to display more aggressive ads to visitors, and different type of ads to logged in members. There are countless other situations to utilize them, displaying the price for an item for visitors, and a different one for members for example. - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (25/03/2019 22:35:50)Just saw your reply... very nice website by your brother, BUT, please tell him that the Homepage has some major responsive issues... again, NicePage bugs...
- Pieter says: (26/03/2019 08:39:54)Nick, amazing video. Thanks so much. So these shortcodes work fine in Nicepage as well... Very strange that NP missed the part with the password protected page in WP.
On the other hand, there is no way I can hand over such a shortcode system to the vast majority of my customers, including my smart ass brother Dr Cooreman... They would screw up big time (and blame me :)
Password protecting pages, fully protected sitemap branches, full blown intranets, and all that, were the first modules I developed for QuickerSite back in 2005. They were the reason for me to develop QS in the first place. I just needed an easy way to provide easy but secure password protection for certain pages and content. No way you can do that with html, css and js only.
For now, the only solution is not use Nicepage for password protected pages in WP. But it's yet another thing to explain to customers, and one day soon, they WILL turn a page to Nicepage, and cause major a security hole. Murphy's law.
Currently thinking on how to easily steal your idea of using shortcodes with protected content in QS. We could easily turn QuickerSite constants into "public", "public only", "members only". But honestly, who would use that if you have a full featured intranet at your disposal... Hard to tell... - Pieter says: (26/03/2019 14:13:11)owkay... this is why you never want to use WP, or in this case, a WP plugin.... Nicepage website is down, NP plugin is down, nothing works...
We're day 1 of this website. I host QuickerSites for more than a decade now. Never ran into this type of blocking issues... Never...
Exit WP. Exit NP. Not with me....
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (26/03/2019 15:18:11)Sometimes I get amazed how extremely intelligent people let their bias es interfere with their logic and assume the wrong things.
I said about the Nicepage server interruptions few days ago, actually I said that about Themler, but I assume they use the same kind of servers. Server issues and the bugs were the main reasons I had rejected in using NP. I could never ever use it in a professional environment.
Nicepage servers have NOTHING to do with WordPress. Having to rely on their servers WAS my main reason to reject using NP. I don't even consider NP a plugin, in reality it is a service. Any plugins that I use are independent, like the shortcodes plugin I sent you yesterday. - Pieter says: (26/03/2019 15:30:42)Story of my life Nick
The thing is: my brother absolutely LOVES Nicepage and the possibilities he now has with it, without even knowing what HTML, CSS or JavaScript actually is... That's the whole point of these modern tools.
But from time to time, technology fails. Meantime, their site is up again, as well as the WP plugin... Very annoying though. - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (26/03/2019 15:42:41)Forget about NP. I have better solutions for him... I'll post and send you stuff tonight when I get home... be patient for a few hours...
