FAQs Archive • Web.Eng AWS Cloud

Q: What are South African companies and developers able to do with the local data centre region?

The addition of this new AWS Region enables all organizations to bring lower latency services to their end-users across Africa, and allows more African organisations to benefit from the performance, security, flexibility, scalability, reliability, and ease of use of the AWS cloud . It enables organisations of all sizes to experiment and innovate faster. AWS Regions meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection. With the new Region, local customers with data residency requirements, and those looking to comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act ( POPIA ), will be able to store their content in South Africa with the assurance that they retain complete ownership of their data and it will not move unless they choose to move it. Africa (Cape Town) is the 23rd AWS Region, and the first one in Africa. It is comprised of three Availability Zones , bringing the Global AWS Infrastructure to a total of 73 Availability Zones (AZ).

Q: What advantages are there for geographically closer data centers?

It’s extremely important for a customer to be able to rely on partners and companies to help them tick boxes in terms of security, migration from on premise to the cloud, complexities of the interface, and most importantly, not only the technical people but also the business entrepreneurs to drive innovation. Below are a few of the many advantages of the new AWS data center in Cape Town Serves customers in the new region with low latency Reduce costs High throughput of automation & DevOps Create applications that create infrastructures. Reduce time to market. Minimise the time to write the code and get it out into production Automate and securely deploy code Local companies can utilise the services of expert managed service providers like Web.Eng

Q: What are some of the use cases for low latency?

The most important example is websites and web applications. This gives the user the perception that the web application is fast and responsive, like a native app. If done right, many things can be accomplished. With that said, higher costs for higher performance is also mitigated with low cost, low latency solutions

Q: Will Web.Eng optimise my images?

Short answer: Yes! Long answer: We know there are multiple different ways to approach image optimisation, which is why recommend using API or cloud-based plugins where all the image processing happens on remote servers and doesn’t require any local executables to be installed (we disapprove enabling the exec() function for security reasons). Below is a short list of plugins we recommend our users explore that abide by this approach: Smush.it plugin (see this blog post for a deeper rundown) EWWW Image Optimizer plugin Kraken Image Optimizer plugin ShortPixel Image Optimizer plugin Note: As an alternative, our VPS hosting plans offer a bit more flexibility with a specialized image processing service we can apply by request. This is our specialized image optimizing service built into our technical stack (at no additional fee) designed to optimise your images on the fly. Bypassing the heavy processing upfront that’s generally required with serving images helps us save your storage and bandwidth costs.

Q: Is caching handled by Web.Eng?

All of the various technology features offered in our stack are configured by the Web.Eng team on the customer’s behalf. Not only do we simply enable caching, but prune your environment making custom tweaks to fully augment the benefits of using our platform, catered individually to your WordPress website. Two of these performance profiting tools are our CDN and Redis Caching services, supported by AWS CloudFront and NGINX. Once cache is set up and functioning properly, the general rule is it can serve two orders of magnitude more of requests per second than PHP while working to conserve the dedicated resources of your Web.Eng VPS.

Q: Additional monitoring services available with Web.Eng

For improved, personalized monitoring and insights beyond our proactive 24/7 Website Uptime Monitoring we have a few solutions available. If you’d like to explore any of these options with our experts, just open a support ticket and we can help get you set up properly with a solution that will adhere to your goals. Custom Monitoring: Monit Our Custom Monitoring system, Monit, is a Web.Eng-specific service we offer as an add-on compatible with any of our hosting plans. This supports real-time metrics for overall system health, PHP-FPM, HTTP request stats, and can be customized to receive any type of metric you wish to collect. This be configured to alert you via email, Slack, etc. For current customers, open a ticket for information and pricing. New Relic Integrations: We also support integrations with New Relic (Infrastructure & APM), NGINX Amplify, LogEntries, and a few other services. If you would like access to granular monitoring & alerting, these services would also allow you to accomplish this. We can install NewRelic and ensure you VPS is paired correctly with the other aforementioned technologies. You would just need to purchase a license with New Relic and we’ll configure it via a support request.

What are South African companies and developers able to do with the local data centre region?

What advantages are there for geographically closer data centers?

What are some of the use cases for low latency?

Will Web.Eng optimise my images?

Is caching handled by Web.Eng?

How to optimise your WordPress website

Additional monitoring services available with Web.Eng

Are there support options available beyond Web.Eng’s standard channels?

Disaster recovery at Web.Eng

The Web.Eng Support Commitment Scope