The problem

Many of us have registered domain names at Moniker.com. And while they are both effective and efficient at registering and managing your domain names for a low "bulk" price, their DNS servers have proven to be utterly unreliable with several day long outtages over the last year.

This means your domains are all good and safe but if you use Moniker's own DNS servers (instead of, for example, your web hosting company's name servers), people may experience additional delay in trying to access your site or they may even not get there at all.

One solution would be to use your web hosting's provider's DNS servers. But these tend to not be very reliable either... and to say the least, they are very slow.

The Solution

So we went out to look for a dedicated DNS service provider. There are many but only a handful use AnyCast. AnyCast allows your visitors to use a DNS server closest to them, cutting latency times and getting their DNS queries answered 10 to 100 times faster than with standard UniCast DNS providers.

Out of these, only one has affordable pricing: DNS Made Easy . For less than $30/year can host DNS service for 10 domain at lightning speeds!

Measuring results

Go check out the speed of your current DNS service here at ultratools.com. Look at the max delays! With Moniker DNS servers you may get delays as long as 350 ms, if not flat out dropped requests! You can…

Why you need a CDN

Using a CDN is one of the easiest and fastest ways to boost your website performance.

In order to see where the biggest peformance bootlenecks are, you can start by having a look at a waterfall graph of your website. The example above comes from b2evolution.net (before optimization). Any modern web browser will let you display this for you own site by using its developer menu/tools. When you do this for your site, just remember to clear your browser cache before measuring, otherwise your results won’t really show what your visitors experience.

The waterfall graph shows one line for each file that is downloaded to display your page. Here are the color codes used by Safari:

• The blue line is the main PHP/HTML file;
• The green lines are for CSS files;
• The yellow lines are for Javascript files;
• Finally the purple ones are for images.

Pay attention to 3 important aspects here:

• There are usually more files than you think that need to be downloaded to display a single web page.
• All files don’t start downloading right away.
• Each file has a long Latency time and a comparatively short Actual Transfer time.

Let’s look at these 3 problems in order.