In this example, we assume you bought a domain from Cloudns.net, and you are having one of our DNS plans. If that is not the case, the steps will be similar, but not the same. 

Set up a DNS zone for sites hosted on WordPress.com

1. Go to https://wordpress.com/ and follow the process to create a web site. Register and log in. 

2. Then choose the type of website, from the options, you would like to have.

3. Depending on the purpose of it, type a corresponding keyword, or a name you like.

4. Go for the free domain. You will be using the other domain name that you have already bought from us. In this example, the domain we will use is ricki.sx 

5. Go to Cloudns.net and log in to your profile. Create a Master DNS Zone file. The Master Zone will let you write and read onto the DNS database. 

To create it you must click on DNS zones and then select Master Zone option. Put just the domain name that you bought (without www. Or http://). 

Now you have created the DNS zone for WordPress, and it is time to put DNS records.

6. We will add a CNAME record that will redirect to where your site is hosted. The CNAME is a canonical record. It serves to show that one domain is an alias for another one. 

We will point the blog (blog.ricki.sx) to the domain (myburst.photo.blog) that was given from WordPress.com. 

7. Then we will create a permanent redirect (301 redirect) that will map the ricki.sx to http://blog.ricki.sx and another for the www subdomain (www.ricki.sx) to the same. 

8. The final action, we want to do, is to edit the redirects and add “Redirect with frame.” This will make your visitors see just the redirected domain and not the original. 

Ready.

Check our Premium DNS plans here!

Set up a DNS zone for WordPress site on hosting with cPanel.

1. Go to your hosting account and log in. Write down the IP address. You will need it in step 6.  

2. Enter the cPanel and click on the Addon Domains. Addon Domains let you control more than 1 domain for your hosting.

3. Now create an Addon Domain with the new domain name rick.sx and subdomain www. 

4. Go to your Cloudns.net and log in. 

5. Create a Master Zone, so later you can add DNS records. 

6. Create two A records. The first to direct from ricki.sx to the IP of the hosting (that one you wrote down back in step 1), and the second to direct from the www.ricki.sx to the same IP.  

Ready!

You can find more interesting articles on our blog.

DNS Troubleshooting – tools and commands

The post How to set up a new DNS zone for your WordPress site appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

Core and Customization

WordPress and Drupal are both open-source (under GNU license) PHP-based CMS. They both have reach functionality out of the box, and they both support modules for more features. WordPress is more popular. It has more available modules and adds on in comparison with Drupal. It also has a more significant community of contributors and developers, although the one of Drupal is not small too.
WordPress has more available themes too. If you choose it, you will have more possibility for creating the best website for you.

Ease of use

Both content management systems are easy to learn. People will say that WordPress is more accessible, especially the backend part of it, but it depends strongly on your use. For a blog site, the two are excellent and easy to set up. WordPress has an edge for faster installation. Many hosting providers have a tool for installing it in just a few minutes.
Drupal is more complicated, and it will be harder to customize. It might require additional knowledge of PHP, CSS, and HTML.

Security

In this round, Drupal is the winner. In order to be competitive, Drupal’s developing team has focused their effort on security. They often post about security fixes on their page, and they regularly provide patches.
WordPress’s security is not horrible. The popularity of it also has a negative effect too. There are far more websites that use WordPress, and this is why there are more hackers’ attacks on those kinds of sites. You can reinforce the security with a 3rd party plug-in, and that way is safer.

Speed

In their purest form, without any cache boosts, Drupal wins this round of WordPress vs Drupal. It is less heavy. It is recommended for websites with many pages. If you want to use WordPress don’t get sad. There are ways to speed it up, check our article “5 tips to speed up WordPress website.”

SEO

We can’t have a WordPress vs Drupal comparison without paying attention to the search engine optimization. As we said already, Drupal is a bit faster which helps with the SEO. Both support custom URLs and responsive design. They both support similar plug-ins for additional SEO help. In this department, the two platforms are a tie.

Conclusion about WordPress vs Drupal

We have chosen WordPress for our blog, because of the simplicity and ease of use. We can recommend it to anyone, who needs a blog for their site. It is fast to set up, and it is mobile friendly.

For people with more experience in website building and who wants to create bigger and more complicated websites, Drupal can be the better platform. It will handle multiple-page sites better, but it will require more time to set it up.

Whatever you choose, you can add extra reliability and speed with a premium DNS. See our DNS plans and choose the right for you.

Which is the best DNS for my business?

Just before we leave you, we want to share with you several examples of websites built with the two platforms. You can see that both platforms produce excellent sites.

WordPress

The New Yorker
BBC America
Variety
Sony Music
Mercedes-Benz

Drupal

Grammy.com
NASA
Harvard University
Nokia
London City

The post WordPress vs Drupal, which CMS to choose? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

What is Drupal CMS?

Drupal is an open-source CMS that was created by Dries Buytaert. Dries is a Dutch and his initial idea about the name of his project was dorp (a village in Dutch). Later he changed his mind and registered it as Drop (drop.org). The open-source nature of the project led to significant interest, and many contributors joined. In 2001, Dries lunch it as a CMS and called it Drupal (from the Dutch word “druppel” which means a drop).

Drupal that we know today is a CMS that works under GNU General Public License, and it is written in PHP. According to W3Techs, 2%(August 2018) of all websites in the world use Drupal.
Between them are Grammy.com, NASA, Harvard University, Nokia, London City and many more.

Advantages of Drupal

Open-source

It is open-source and free. The complete source code is available, so you can get it and use it according to the GNU license. It is an attractive platform for new website owners who don’t want to spend a lot of money.

Reach core features

The core of Drupal has everything that you need to start a site – system administration, account management, layout customization, RSS-feeds and more.

Support for template

If you don’t want to start from scratch, there are plenty of templates available. You can modify the menus and create a good looking site that is suited for your needs.

Good content creation

Drupal has an excellent article creation tools out of the box. With the help of some extensions, you can create stunning multimedia content that includes music, video, text, podcasts and more.

Content management

The platform is well-organized. You can put the articles into categories, change their URLs and many attributes. You can manage, who can see specific content, who can edit it, who can see just the statistic and more.

Disadvantages of Drupal

Interface

New users can experience difficulty understanding the interface. Yes, there are plenty of options, but it is often hard to understand how to use them. It has significantly improved over the years, but still, it is harder to understand than WordPress or Joomla.

Less popular than WordPress

WordPress has taken the world by storm. It is the most popular CMS by a large margin, and that is an important factor. Even though there are many extensions for Drupal and big community, still WordPress has more. The most prominent developers have WordPress as a priority and put less time on extensions for Drupal.

Hard to update and install modules

Most of the installations and updates are made through FTP. This makes it a bit harder to administrate in comparison with the competition.

Conclusion

Drupal is the third most popular CMS out there, and it is worth your attention. It is very versatile, and it has a huge community behind. You can quickly adapt it to your need. Is it better than the rest? It really depends on your needs and your previous knowledge in site management and creation. It can be a bit harder to learn than WordPress, but it more flexible and it can adapt to your desire.

The post Drupal. Is it a good CMS? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

1. Choose a good web hosting

As we said earlier, speed is essential. Choosing a good web hosting is not easy. Many of the web hosting companies don’t show all of the information to the public, so you need to ask extra. The most important aspects are that the servers are modern, that they use SSD, they give you enough resources for you (what percentage of the shared resources are you getting), physical location and of course the price. The web hosting might be the most significant investment so take your time.

2. Use a barebone theme

Barebone WordPress theme might be a bit contra logical to you but bear with us for a moment. Yes, a barebone theme will be less spectacular, but again our primary concern is speed. It will load a lot faster and give you an advantage in the Google ranking. You need to be sure that the theme is mobile-friendly too. This is a very cheap update.

3. Optimize images

And this one is entirely free! Use a compressed format like .JPG for your images and keep the resolution down. You don’t need a full 20Mpx image, especially when most of the internet traffic comes from mobile with an average 1080p display. Use 1MPx image and your pages will load fast and still provide a quality post for your visitors. For the resizing, you can use an online site or download a image resizing application on your device.

4. Speed up WordPress using caching plugin

There are free and paid options. We recommend you WP Super Cache. This one creates static HTML files that most of your visitors will see instead of the WordPress PHP scripts. Html is lighter and easier to load.

5. Use CDN

You can create your own CDN (content delivery network) using DNS. It will give you the chance to have many more point of presence in the world. Like this, your users from China will be redirected from the servers close to them in Asia and the ones in The US will have others close by. It will significantly reduce the time to load for your page, and you can use it with all of the previous speed up WordPress tips.

If you are interested, you can check our GeoDNS or talk to our sales team that can give you extra details.  It is relatively inexpensive, and it gives excellent results.

Conclusion

To be one step ahead of your competitors is not easy, but with good research and some tweaks, you can get far better results. Some of these speed up WordPress optimizations cost extra money, but when you see the difference in reach and positioning you will be content.

The post 5 tips to speed up WordPress website appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

What is CDN?

CDN is a content delivery system that you can get with GeoDNS. It uses many PoPs (points of presence) around the globe, where the data of your website is cached. When a visitor wants to see your site, he or she will be redirected to the closest PoP near him or he will get the data from that server there. This saves a lot of time because his or her request won’t go to the original hosting server, but rather to the one near him. This can increase the speed significantly. For example, your website is hosted in an Asian hosting but an American is trying to visit it, then the American won’t need to get the data from Asia, he will be redirected to a server near in the United States.

The advantages of CDN

• Boost the speed. Obviously, the shorter distance that the requests from your visitors will do, makes them load the pages faster. The speed is significant, so even with a heave WordPress there, it will still load normally.
• SEO! You will get better ranking on Google thanks to the less loading time.
• Load Balance. Your WordPress website is getting more popular and you are experiencing more traffic? Don’t worry, with CDN you can redirect the traffic and spread it around through the different PoPs.
• Reduces the bandwidth. Coming from the previous point, it also helps you with the limited bandwidth that web host services provide.
• Protection. It adds an extra level of protection against DDoS attacks by load balancing. This will lead to less downtime for your site.

Conclusion

Using a content delivery system for your WordPress site is an easy external way to speed up your site. You can combine it with internal optimization and get an excellent result. If you want to start using CDN, you can check our GeoDNS. Look at the different options and choose the best for you according to the size and traffic of your site.

The post Speed up WordPress with CDN appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.