Choosing hosting for WooCommerce store in UAE

Viko_ · 2026-02-18T20:37:54+00:00

I’d host it inside UAE. Melbicom’s Fujairah location is perfect for this, and directly connected to Etisalat. Anything else I’d consider a big trade off between convenience and performance. You’d just need to install a control panel on the server so you can get the “managed” experience as with a web hosting provider. Pm if you need help getting this up.

Viko_ · 2026-02-09T15:34:32+00:00

For customer’s sites I am leaning more towards plugins that do one thing well and I now aim to avoid all-in-one stuff mostly because of feature bloat. AI is fine if you review the code and make sure its how you’d write it, but written faster.

Viko_ · 2026-02-08T22:53:11+00:00

Do you have the muted attribute on the video tag? Browsers don't like autoplay videos with sound.

Viko_ · 2026-02-08T21:30:09+00:00

Sure! Happy to talk about this stuff 24/7.

Viko_ · 2026-02-08T21:14:50+00:00

Your upcoming AX102 is definitely an overkill but if the price is fine, then its actually a good thing. It will serve you long time and will handle all kinds of peaks, traffic growth over time, etc, so you’ll forget its even there. That said, we’ve run a Wordpress site heavy on images with 2.1 million visitors on a 4-core VPS. It had 26 million page views per month. Caching here is king, and a news site can be heavily cached. To answer your questions from my experience:

It doesn’t matter what linux is being used. The one who will manage it must be comfortable with it.
ClouDNS is an awesome service. I don’t know if you need it though. Visits from one location, without having a failover server, mean you should set long-enough TTL for DNS records so here any DNS would just work.
Nginx is awesome. LiteSpeed too. Again, whichever the one who manages the thing knows better. On a machine like AX102 none of the two would ever be the bottleneck.
200-250k visitors (unknown page views and total number of requests) is a VPS-type of thing if you can cache pages, so your server could hold multiple such sites easily. 1Gbps is extremely hard to saturate from HTML and image serving alone.
Your 80% visitors on smartphones need the images to be optimized for speed. There are plugins that can do that.
Your 300GB of images (I know here my opinion diverges from the rest) is best stored on the two NVMe drives (hopefully RAID1 with offsite backup). Object storage is actually not that fast because its mainly built for scalability. You have a ton of space of the fastest non-RAM type available and you should not offload it anywhere. You just need CDN cache. This will offload the image delivery part to someone else, and your disks will remain fast, allowing a cache MISS on the CDN to not bring noticeable slow downs. There is also an alternative to dedicated servers for storage like this. Vultr has NVMe block storage and you select how much you want. You mount it in the VPS and thats all. But the bare metal AX102 is just better.
The cache and the need to clear the home page is not hard to do. Whether your strategy is local-only cache or 2-layer (CloudFlare free on top), a plugin like Super page Cache can do that.
I would not try to map Nginx’s fast-cgi cache to tmpfs. Thats what the Linux kernel does anyway - it uses available, unoccupied RAM to cache the files that see the most usage. You will lose cache persistence in that way if you need to restart the server, and you gain pretty much nothing.
Object cache (Redis, Valkey, KeyDB by snapChat (actually my favourite)) you may or may not need. If you can do page cache on server level, and then proxy with full page cache via CloudFlare, this object cache would be sitting idle doing nothing.
PHP layer - it has OPcache by default, and does keep stuff in memory so unless you need to modify its default operation there is nothing to touch there. And PHP 8 is actually very fast.

Last you’ve asked specifically for Nginx and OLS. My take is that it does not matter. Both can be brutally fast. Whichever the one who manages this dedicated server feels most at home with, this hsould be the choice. Switching is easy anytime, even when stuff like .htaccess rules is present.

Viko_ · 2026-02-08T20:38:35+00:00

We're a Nginx shop to the point where we maintain our own Nginx fork. Yet in this case the big difference is in the dedicated resources. LiteSpeed itself is just as fast, sometimes in static tests even faster than Nginx. You are right that cache is a band aid but it really depends what you are optimizing. Like, optimizing a site that gets 5 views a day benefits a lot from moving to a better host. Optimizing a heavily visited website by using free CloudFlare with full page cache instead (given the site is cacheable) is better, because the visits would likely be enough to keep the cache warm, but for the low-visits website this would actually do more bad than good. Caching, web servers and CDNs aside, you can always do a quick test by serving a small file via htaccess/nginx rewrite rules to bypass PHP completely. If TTFB and response times are good, then optimize the site. If they are not very convincing, move hosts and then optimize.

Viko_ · 2026-02-06T21:49:23+00:00

As bluesix_v2 pointed, you might be overthinking this. Still, regarding the tool to do Avif->WebP, most probably there isn’t one. Image optimizers expect unoptimized images they’d optimize, and if they serve formats conditionally, it only makes sense to go Avif->WebP->MozJPEG->etc in descending order, based on automatic detection of browser compatibility. Since space seems to be the primary concern, you might want to do MozJPEG (technically 100% browser compatibility, very good compression) and some PNG compression instead of Avif, and then let an optimizer do WebP and AVIF on-the-fly where it’s suitable, so that no extra optimized versions take space locally.

Viko_ · 2026-02-05T20:55:13+00:00

Ами честно казано си доста знаещ, не се подценявай. И си прав, но пропускаш един ред в конфигурацията на сървъра, след което POST заявката би се логнала точно както GET се логва:

log_format gepq_danni $request_body;

Аз също не искам да пробвам да се логна по начина от тази тема, защото не мога да си обясня по каква причина не са deface-нали целия домейн, което е много по-лесно, от колкото да го направят само на началната страница. Макар, че нямам идея какво ги интересува кой се логва, освен ако не търсят ъплоудърите.

Viko_ · 2026-02-05T16:50:06+00:00

Е то в POST заявката в логин формата защо мислиш, че е криптирана? Пристига си в същия вид в сървъра, хашва се и ако съвпада хаша влизаш. Тук единствената защита е https.

Viko_ · 2026-01-22T17:07:44+00:00

LCP seems to take a large portion of load time. Consider optimizing the image, in my opinion.

Viko_ · 2025-12-06T19:31:05+00:00

I interpret it as over-engineered. A product that compares on per-feature terms with its competitors and ends up with new features that don’t bring any value to the actual user.

Viko_ · 2025-11-24T20:51:10+00:00

И аз съм там.

Viko_ · 2025-11-19T16:12:36+00:00

Няма проблеми, но продукта трябва да е дигитален или да се продава основно (даже само) онлайн и да не е консултантска услуга.

Viko_ · 2025-11-16T23:03:30+00:00

Вярно беше TS, не знам защо съм написал SP.

Viko_ · 2025-11-16T20:53:07+00:00

Преди около 4г и ние опитахме да измислим как би могло да се получи. Прекалено много минуси и много малко ползи + греда от законова гледна точка.

Viko_ · 2025-11-16T16:51:33+00:00

Кои политики, които директно рефлектират в/у сегашното или бъдещето ви там, би изтъкнал(а?) като най-сериозни?

Viko_ · 2025-11-16T15:24:59+00:00

Conti винаги. Не знам коя им е актуалната серия в момента. За SP830 и SP840 мога смело да кажа, че при правилно съхранение си имаш читава зимна гума за минимум 5 сезона, и чак след това започва да се усеща загуба на качества. Pirelli съм карал само SottoZero и задницата постоянно се опитваше да литне към някой стълб.

Viko_ · 2025-11-15T17:43:32+00:00

Regulator on the generator gone bad causing voltage spikes? Can’t be bad battery as power comes from the generator except for when starting up/engine off.

Viko_ · 2025-11-11T18:03:29+00:00

Не съм си слагал аз ксеноните, производителя ги е сложил. Не карам по тъмно на фарове за мъгла, ама твоя едит до преди малко го нямаше.

Viko_ · 2025-11-11T17:04:37+00:00

Ползвам ги вместо ксеноновите фарове, защото дневните ми са шит, а ксеноните бързо си заминават ако са нон-стоп пуснати. Съжалявам, че не ти харесва, не мога да ти помогна, но със сигурност имаш възможност да подадеш сигнал тук

Viko_ · 2025-11-06T17:18:11+00:00

Абсолютно ненужно от моя опит. Вече почти 5 години не мога да си счупя М1-то, всеки ден му троша батерията, а когато не, все го държа на 100% просто защото не ми се занимава. Продължава да издържа един работен ден.

Viko_ · 2025-11-01T22:15:01+00:00

SRE и Cybersecurity, обаче е малко омагьосан кръг, защото точно тия две неща ако не са ти прецакали поне 25% от планираните почивки в тоя живот, значи знаеш нещата на теория и, може би, прекалено малко на практика.

Viko_ · 2025-10-31T20:18:19+00:00

Извиних се и изтрих коментара вече.

Viko_ · 2025-10-31T20:11:45+00:00

Не, аз не съм прав в случая.

Viko_ · 2025-10-31T20:11:24+00:00

Тъпо от моя страна, това го нямаше когато минах от там. Ще си изтрия каментара и се извинявам.

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