April was huge month for Kernl with regards to infrastructure! We also fixed a handful of bugs and started work on a new analytics feature. Let’s dig in. Features, bugs, & infrastructure RoboSwarm, the Kernl product that powers our load testing product, has been migrated to Heroku. This is part of a broader effort to… Continue reading What’s New With Kernl – April 2021
Running WordPress on Azure B1ls Virtual Machines
Have you ever wondered “How bad is it to run a WordPress site on a $3.80/month virtual machine in Azure?”. I haven’t either. But as I was browsing Azure virtual machine options the other day I came across the B1ls machines and figured I would give it a go. If for no reason other than… Continue reading Running WordPress on Azure B1ls Virtual Machines
What’s New With Kernl – March 2021
It was an eventful March at Kernl, so without further ado let’s dive in! Features, Infrastructure, & Bug Fixes All application servers have been upgraded to use AMD Premium droplets on DigitalOcean. These have better performance characteristics than the regular droplets and should make Kernl’s performance more consistent. The licensing /validate-with-domain endpoint now includes the… Continue reading What’s New With Kernl – March 2021
Are DigitalOcean Premium Droplets Better for WordPress?
Back on February 23, 2021 DigitalOcean announced the launch of their “premium” droplets. These Droplets are in the same tier as their shared-resource counterparts, but running on next generation Intel or AMD hardware. As soon as these were released, my first thought was “I wonder if WordPress runs better on these premium droplets?”. I ran… Continue reading Are DigitalOcean Premium Droplets Better for WordPress?
WordPress Plugin Banners Now Supported
As of March 1, 2021 Kernl now supports WordPress plugin banners! As you can see, the plugin detail screen rendered without a banner is OK, but the screen looks a lot cleaner with banner support. Much better! You can add your own banners by going to -> Edit Plugin -> Icon & Banners while inside… Continue reading WordPress Plugin Banners Now Supported
What’s New With Kernl – February 2021
February was a busy month for Kernl that focused on fixing some long-standing bugs, infrastructure upgrades, and a few behavior changes. Let’s dive in! Bugs, Performance, and Infrastructure RoboSwarm & Kernl Load Testing Upgrades – RoboSwarm and Kernl WordPress load testing have been updated to use the latest version of Locust, Python, and Ubuntu when… Continue reading What’s New With Kernl – February 2021
What’s New With Kernl – January 2021
It’s the first update of 2021 and I hope it finds you well! With any sort of luck 2021 will be a better year than 2020 was. Let’s dive in to the update. Features, updates, bugs Unified Redis – Kernl uses Redis in a handful of different places for caching and queuing. It used to… Continue reading What’s New With Kernl – January 2021
Vultr WooCommerce Showdown – Cloud or High Frequency?
So you’ve decided to host your WooCommerce site on Vultr. Great! You could be hosting through Cloudways or direct, but you still need to make the choice: Vultr Cloud or Vultr High Frequency? How do you choose? The pricing is pretty close and it hasn’t always been clear which has the best performance characteristics in… Continue reading Vultr WooCommerce Showdown – Cloud or High Frequency?
Which Cloudways Hosting Provider is Best for WooCommerce?
In the world of WooCommerce hosting there are a lot of options. One of the often recommended hosting services is Cloudways, which makes it very easy to spin up a reasonably performant WooCommerce site. You do still have to make a few choices though, including whether to use DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, or GCP. So… Continue reading Which Cloudways Hosting Provider is Best for WooCommerce?
What’s New With Kernl – December 2020
The final “What’s New With Kernl” for 2020 is upon us! There were a lot of great updates this month, so let’s dive in a see what changed. Features, Infrastructure, & Bugs Site Health Lighthouse – This month we started using the lighthouse Node.js package to generate Lighthouse scores. Prior to this we were making… Continue reading What’s New With Kernl – December 2020