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Last December Amazon announced its new EBS gp3 volumes, which offer better performance and a cost saving of 20% compared to those that have been used until now (gp2). Well, after successfully testing these new volumes with multiple clients, I can do nothing but recommend their use, because they are all advantages and in these 2 and a half months that have passed since the announcement I have not noticed any problems or side effects.

One of the biggest annoyances when working with AWS and your Internet connection has a dynamic IP is that when it changes, you immediately stop accessing to all servers and services protected by an EC2 security group whose rules only allow traffic to certain specific IP’s instead of allowing open connections to everyone (0.0.0.0.0/0).

Certainly the simplest thing to do is always allowing traffic on a given port to everyone, so that even if you have a dynamic IP on your Internet connection you will always be able to continue accessing even if it changes. But opening traffic on a port to everyone is not the right way to proceed from a security point of view, because then any attacker will be able to access that port without restrictions, and that is not what you want.

Creating a MySQL or MariaDB user and granting permissions to him to access a specific database and be able to write data on it is a very usual task that is necessary to perform each time you install a new application based on any of these database engines, like web applications running on top of LAMP stack. Whether it is a simple WordPress, or a more complex application tailor made, one way or another you will always have to complete these steps at some point before its deployment.

One of the most targeted goals when optimizing a website for page load speed is to get a good score on Google PageSpeed Insights test. But it is not enough to work hard on optimization, achieve a good score and go to sleep. It is essential to periodically monitor score changes as a website evolves and undergoes changes over time which affect this metric.

Here’s a little script that will allow you to automatically track Google PageSpeed Insight score and be alerted if it falls below a custom value.

It is often common to embed a Facebook «Like» button on your website so that on the one hand you show the number of followers of your Facebook page and on the other hand you invite the user to click on it to start following your page. However, this type of buttons tend to overload a website quite a lot because they consist of Javascript code that dynamically generates the button with the updated number of followers and the functionality needed to give a «Like». This means that every time you load a page of your website you have to send 11 extra requests to the Facebook servers to download all the necessary elements. Given that these servers are currently located on the west coast of the United States and are not available through any CDN or similar service, depending on where the user is located, it is likely that each of these requests will have to cross half the globe to complete the download. All this causes your website to slow down unnecessarily and its loading speed is affected, which is quite negative in multiple aspects.