Frequently Asked Questions for KYNGIN/Web
Q: How often are KYNGIN web servers upgraded
Minor versions are upgraded regularly, typically weekly to monthly depending on the quantity of hosts in the server. If we detect any security issues in the installed packages, those are upgraded as quickly as possible.
KYNGIN has a dedicated build box for a number of operating systems which provide us patched software days earlier than the package distributions at official repositories.
Q: How do you handle TLS/SSL certificates?
KYNGIN TLS certificate generation is automatic after the initial request. We use cost free certificates provided by Lets Encrypt (donate here) at this time. All of KYNGIN/WS servers pass A+ certification from Qualys SSL Labs and are regularly updated to maintain these levels of qualification.
After the certificate is generated, our automated systems request new certificates every 30-70 days. The process is mostly hassle free, as long as the website doesn't have invalid hostnames, which can be added or removed using the KYNGIN web interface.
Q: What Content Management Solutions (CMS) are supported?
Any static HTML or dynamic PHP based, open-source CMS is supported. We don't believe in any vendor lock-in, and no contractual obligations or pricing gimmicks (1 year discounts+ etc) for clients.
To prove this, KYNGIN hosted websites are easy to export, we offer no-cost options to fully export all data that we host, and unless you installed something proprietary, you should have easy access to re-activate this software at whatever hosting company you desire. We provide this as a commitment to all of our clients: If you aren't happy with our services for any reason, please use our easy tools to export your data to a different hosting company.
BTW - If a company isn't offering full export of your content that will work on any other open source hosting platform, stay away. Many companies use proprietary technologies to keep you locked into their hosting, if this is the case, please do your best to move on to another hosting company before you end up reliant on their hosting stack features.
Q: Many companies focus on single CMS support, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc. Does KYNGIN have any preferences?
No. Intentionally we will not marry ourselves to a single CMS for website hosting. We are CMS neutral, and support all open source content management solutions.
We understand it's easy to get attached to a single CMS. But the competitive company will be better if they stay skeptical of the future of CMS products and always keep their eye open for new options as they present themselves. If you are using any open source CMS product do some investigation a couple times a year on other options that are available. You'll find that no single tool is the best for all jobs, and quite the opposite: Trying to make a single tool do everything is probably costing you quite a bit.
This website for instance was built using MkDocs, written in markdown, version controlled with git, and exports all content to plain old HTML very quickly over rsync. We can make updates to entire paragraphs of text and take them live, securely, before most people have located their password to login to their CMS. We have experience doing this with Hugo as well as more professional front-end builds like www.kyngin.com using TailwindCSS and BootStrap.
KYNGIN.NET is built nearly entirely using a java web application, compiled and deployed onto a Tomcat web server, with some additional components necessary that use apache + over-protective .htaccess rules and plain old text files. The process allows us to deliver the highest levels of performance and maintainability with very minimal need of 3rd party plugins or libraries (at this point, the system is almost entirely built only using Java's standard library).
That said, other CMS solutions may offer better platforms for more complex needs: Discussion forums with (PHPBB), personal or commercial websites with lots of plugin needs or easier updates by non-tech end-users using (WordPress or Joomla), and even more fully custom designs with (Drupal or Symfony).
Q: Are any rate limits in place?
No, our systems will scale to maximum burstable throughput of your web application or until your application hits CPU or disk contention, though if that is the case we'd recommend discussing with us options for dedicated load-balancing front-ends. Our proactive systems will notify us when we hit these rates and we'll be in touch if this is a concern.
We do have some security limits in place to prevent against malicious actors, but those are not triggered for common users.
Q: Does KYNGIN have any intention to include CDN's?
Not at this time. CDN's are effectively a security anti-pattern: a large amount of privacy risk with minimal gain. We see some value in the performance gains of geographically distributed content, but largely are opposed to the security effects.
For (likely better) performance, all things considered, we don't see the CDN being superior to high speed caching front-ends, and our tests are suggesting our front-ends are faster for most use cases, as well as generally more stable.
If your site improves in speed because of a CDN, it's likely the caching effects of the CDN, not the "distribution network" portion.
Slow sites can be solved by a good hosting, well built designs, and (if necessary) a front-end proxy server or load balancers. Before you go the CDN route, make sure you are hosting at a quality hosting company that isn't overloaded, and also that your website is built well (no errors being produced by faulty PHP code, reduce slow 3rd party plugins, reduce content sizes and total number of requests, etc). You'll find that a majority if your problems disappear with well built websites. For sites that get large amounts of traffic, we recommend a front-end proxy service such as NGiNX or Varnish.