April 12th 2023

To change or not to change hosts

TomBoss is having trouble deciding what to do to increase the speed of his main website. After some optimization (Cache, CDN, etc) it gets A/B marks on GTmetrix most of the time, but sometimes D-F marks just minutes later. Moreover, loading speed tends to be more than 3 seconds, sometimes more than 10 seconds, even if GTmetrix gives it 100% in performance and an A. The speed of the same exact page can differ by a lot just minutes later. His sites are hosted on a server in Singapore with most traffic coming from Asia and the USA. He has a reseller account with each site having its own cPanel and, looking at a previous thread he posted, all his sites are on an IP address dedicated to him. He's posted details of his setup and the resources he's allocated, and would like to know if changing hosts would be the solution to his varying speed issues. There are already verious suggestions about optimization, checking network stability, or moving to a server with a more current processor. What would you suggest he does, or what tests could he run to identify where the actual bottleneck is?

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AI-generated forum posts

The volume of AI-generated text on websites is growing rapidly, but should community-based sites like forums allow their use to create posts? That's the subject of this thread as members are noticing an increase in such posts, along with text created for other sites. Whilst some describe AI text generators as toys their output can, in fact, be misleading or even dangerous. WHT has always been proud of the way members will spend considerable time and effort putting posts together that help others, often participating frequently in a thread sharing their knowledge and expertise, and all freely. What's the effect of an AI generated post appearing in such a thread? Does it dilute the value of the thread? Is it off-putting for regular contributors? Whilst there are many AI-text generators becoming available, there also seems to be a race on to design on-line tools to detect them with increasing accuracy. It's also noticable how many times AI text generators are being used to create what appear to be intelligent posts and comments by SEO "experts" in a bid to camouflage their previously lower value efforts to promote sites they're working on. So what's the future for AI generators? Share your thoughts in this thread.

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News from around the hosting industry

Our Industry News section is the place to find current headlines from around the world of hosting and infrastructure, but other general interest threads pop up in other sections of the forum, especially The Lounge. Here we we highlight just some of the interesting news items from around the forum:

• China to build new $500M Mediterranean subsea cable - Three of the top Chinese telcos are planning a new $500M subsea cable. It's reported that China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, who withdrew from the rival SEA-ME-WE-6 subsea cable project earlier this year, are planning a new Europe-Middle East-Asia (EMA) cable, mapping out what is set to be the "world’s most advanced and far-reaching subsea cable network" aiming to create a Chinese system that rivals the US-backed project.
• AI rush and chip demand causing server shortages at cloud giants - The current server chip shortage is frustrating AI developers who are having difficulties renting servers from the likes of AWS and Google Cloud. All fingers point to Nvidia, producing the majority of GPUs for AI software development. However, cloud providers may have failed to foresee the rush of new AI customers and not ordered enough chips. Cloud providers with expanding data centers also are struggling with a lack of energy sources to power them.
• Green Mountain and KMW partner for new German data center - Norwegian data center firm Green Mountain has entered into an agreement with energy company KMW to establish a new data center in Germany. The 54 MW data center will be in Mainz, outside Frankfurt, and close to the Frankfurt DE-CIX hub. The companies own equal share of the new joint venture.
• Amazon Web Services investing in Australia - AWS will invest more than $13B expanding Australian cloud computing. The investment will come over the next five years as Amazon Web Services expands cloud operations in Sydney and Melbourne. It aims to run its data centers entirely on renewable energy. The investment in the expansion and operation of the two center will bring in 11,000 full-time-equivalent positions.

Got some news of your own to share? If it's news from your own company it belongs in Web Hosting Industry Announcements (no ads please!). If you've scooped some news about something else going on in the hosting industry we'd love for you to share it in our Industry News section!

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