Examples of FastMail Hosted Web Sites
 

Hi,

I've read some threads here about hosting web sites on FastMail, and I'd love to see some real examples.

Anyone know of any URLs?

Thanks

Bad idea to post here if you´re using a Basic or Standard account: limited to 1 GB/2 GB bandwidth daily (and also hourly limit which is half the daily limit, and a 10-minute limit, which is half the hourly limit).

Maybe someone with a Professional account (bandwidth 200 GB) could post...

I didn't realise that this forum has so much traffic that my little post could result in someone's web site crashing :)

In any event, with a bit of searching and use of Terminal I was able to identify several sites hosted by FastMail/New York Internet.

There are posts in this forum suggesting that FastMail-hosted sites should be very fast, but that was not borne out. I actually found them to be quite slow, although I didn't look at the coding, which could account for that at least in part. The thing is, they were all slow, pretty unacceptably so.

If anyone has a static site on FastMail and is willing to send me a personal message with the URL, I'd like to see how such a site compares, in terms of speed, with hosting by, for example, GitHub or Netlify.

Thanks

> There are posts in this forum suggesting that FastMail-hosted sites
> should be very fast, but that was not borne out. I actually found them
> to be quite slow,

This puzzles me, as I was under the impression that one could only host a very basic site with FM - nothing that would for example require its server to do anything other than serve files.

How did you test speed?

What method did you use to actually identify if the sites in question were hosted by FastMail's web hosting specifically?

As a rule, any site hosted by FastMail should resolve to 66.111.4.53 and 66.111.4.54. If they're not pointing to those IP addresses, they're not being hosted by FastMail's web service, regardless of other ways in which they may be associated with FastMail.

My thoughts exactly. The whole reason why FastMail is fast is because it's flat, static HTML files that are being served, so the speed is dependent only upon the bandwidth available to serve those files.

Now, that doesn't prevent somebody from shooting themselves in the foot with a lot of synchronous Javascript, or by not having their images properly web-optimized, but that's a design issue that has nothing to do with where your website is hosted, other than perhaps not having the necessary bandwidth to serve up huge images.

My own little personal blog (feel free to check it out here), which is static HTML that I built using Jekyll, runs lightning fast, but there's almost no JS there beyond the usual lightweight Disqus and Google Analytics pieces, and it's extremely light on images. For comparison, I have a copy of it over on Google cloud hosting as well, but there are no practical performance differences.

Everything that I looked at resolved to those IP addresses. Looks like the servers are all New York Internet.

There are a number of discussions on the internet about how to do this and some sites will give you reverse information. I also used the ping command in MacOS Terminal and hostingcompass.com.

Thanks for the URL for your site. It behaves on FastMail/NYI as I would expect a Jekyll site to behave, which is what I wanted to know. It loads much faster than the ones that I looked at.

Yup, New York Internet is FastMail's colocation provider, but of course they would also host a lot of other servers and services, so I wanted to make sure you were actually looking at FastMail's web hosting, since it's certainly possible that lookup information to NYI might not be for FastMail —*it wouldn't be the first time I've seen PTR records or information in the ARIN database be incorrect :)

Yeah, my hunch was that the other websites likely aren't well-optimized. I came across one just the other day that was ridiculously slow for a static HTML site. I quickly discovered that all images that they were serving had been shot on a 22 megapixel DSLR and there were serving them as full-resolution TIFF files :eek:

A couple of off-topic questions: Is the copy served from a storage bucket, and how do you like Google cloud for hosting static sites?

No doubt jhollington will respond, but I'd like to offer a comment.

If you want to run a static site, the host provider (leaving aside issues like server location) shouldn't matter. The fact that jhollington's site performs the same on FastMail and Google Cloud demonstrates that.

That said, there are some host providers that are optimised in the back end for static sites. If you haven't checked them out already, maybe have a look at the U.S. host providers GitHub and Netlify and the New Zealand host provider CloudCanon. For example, CloudCanon makes it really easy to get a static site up and running even if one doesn't know much about CSS/HTML.

Yup, from a standard storage bucket, and it serves static sites just as well as anything else out there (which, as redge points out, shouldn't make much of a difference anyway), but there are a couple of caveats to using Google cloud storage buckets for this...

For one, you don't get direct SFTP access. You have to upload/change files either using the Google Cloud Console on the web, or using Google's command-line cloud shell tools.

The second limitation is that there's no way to realistically get proper SSL support. There is an SSL path to the cloud storage buckets, but it uses a certificate that's assigned to the "real" Google cloud name (*.storage.googleapis.com), which of course won't match and throw up an error if you try to access your site directly over SSL. By contrast, FastMail recently added the ability to install LetsEncrypt SSL certificates on its static web hosting by basically clicking a single checkbox.

Thanks redge and jhollington. Both of your responses were very helpful.