flip.uk - .UK Domain Auctions and Marketplace

[Jameso.0]

Yeah very slow to load for the last few days

 

[super-whois]

Must be all that traffic for cleanthemes.co.uk

 

[webber]

@lazarus, are you aware your site is down again, seems to be happening a lot in the last couple of days.

Not down down, but very very slow to respond again (ie many seconds for a page load)
Been going on for the past few days, on and off, mostly during daytime. At night it seems to be better.
How can we help?

 

[aZooZa]

Maybe something useful here:

https://geekflare.com/test-your-website-load-time/

 

[lazarus]

Sorry about that folks, It's a constant battle with bad traffic. Hopefully it is running a lot smoother now

 

[Ben Thomas]

Been happening since at least November 23rd, which is when I noticed it. I asked Colin if he was doing some maintenance (which I thought would be likely).

Hi Colin,

Trying to add a domain (jio.uk) to auction, site is down. Some maintenance?

DDoS or just bad database management or something, I wonder. If you haven't already, @lazarus try Litespeed Web Server instead of Apache, it's great for WordPress.

 

[seemly]

Been happening since at least November 23rd, which is when I noticed it. I asked Colin if he was doing some maintenance (which I thought would be likely).



DDoS or just bad database management or something, I wonder. If you haven't already, @lazarus try Litespeed Web Server instead of Apache, it's great for WordPress.

Moving to an alternative web server that doesn't mitigate any potential bad traffic doesn't feel like a move in the right direction.

Implementing Cloudflare would be my first suggestion. Even the free tier provides:

• Unmetered DDoS mitigation
• Globally Load Balanced CDN
  
• One-click "Under Attack Mode" which enforces a JS challenge to bad actors
• Custom firewall rules
• Email obfuscation
• DNS management

I added it to domainsaleshistory.uk for pretty much all the reasons listed above.

They also provide at-cost domain registrations and renewals.

 

[Ben Thomas]

Moving to an alternative web server that doesn't mitigate any potential bad traffic doesn't feel like a move in the right direction.

I'm not sure why you would think this? I didn't just recommend it for no reason. Flip.uk is built on top of WordPress. Litespeed Web Server uses LSCACHE plugin to provide caching service for WordPress (on top of object caching such as memcached), thus allowing more bandwidth to be freed up.

Secondly, Litespeed utilises per-client throttling which can mitigate bad traffic. You can also use their QUIC.cloud service integrated with LSCache to further mitigate DoS or DDoS attacks or bot traffic, as documented here. No need for Cloudflare, which is an overall solution and not a fit-for-wordpress solution out of the box, unlike Litespeed Web Server.

 

[seemly]

I'm not sure why you would think this? I didn't just recommend it for no reason. Flip.uk is built on top of WordPress. Litespeed Web Server uses LSCACHE plugin to provide caching service for WordPress (on top of object caching such as memcached), thus allowing more bandwidth to be freed up.

Secondly, Litespeed utilises per-client throttling which can mitigate bad traffic. You can also use their QUIC.cloud service integrated with LSCache to further mitigate DoS or DDoS attacks or bot traffic, as documented here. No need for Cloudflare, which is an overall solution and not a fit-for-wordpress solution out of the box, unlike Litespeed Web Server.

To be honest, I didn't realise Flip was built on Wordpress. I've slept since reading the first few posts in this thread, and the generated HTML shows no immediate or obvious signs of being Wordpress driven. My apologies.

On a personal note, I would much prefer a 3rd party automatically filter and handle bad actors before they even hit my servers. It also becomes a domain of the infrastructure I don't need to even think about anymore - which I imagine is hugely appealing for non-revenue generating applications. It was for me.

If the bad actors are getting to the server, and they can send enough traffic, I'm fairly sure it's going to be taxing on the server, right? Which would still require manual investigation and action?

Saying that - server management and networking isn't my strength, so I'm willing to sit this one out.

 

[Ben Thomas]

To be honest, I didn't realise Flip was built on Wordpress. I've slept since reading the first few posts in this thread, and the generated HTML shows no immediate or obvious signs of being Wordpress driven. My apologies.

I often use this tool to see what tech a website is using. But you can usually tell WordPress by its directory structure via page source.

On a personal note, I would much prefer a 3rd party automatically filter and handle bad actors before they even hit my servers.

Understandably, which is what QUIC.cloud does with their CDN.

 

[seemly]

I often use this tool to see what tech a website is using. But you can usually tell WordPress by its directory structure via page source.

I just checked using the tool you suggest, and it doesn't say the site is built on Wordpress.

Even the CSS and JS assets don't have the usual enqueue IDs on them, so there has clearly been quite a lot of effort to make it not look like Wordpress (if it is Wordpress).

Understandably, which is what QUIC.cloud does with their CDN.

So this is a premium service?

 

[Ben Thomas]

I just checked using the tool you suggest, and it doesn't say the site is built on Wordpress.

Even the CSS and JS assets don't have the usual enqueue IDs on them, so there has clearly been quite a lot of effort to make it not look like Wordpress (if it is Wordpress).

We can tell it's WordPress by the bottom two pieces of software and looking into the source code I can see the site is using "Eight" as a theme framework, which I believe is a WooCommerce theme.

So this is a premium service?

It is, but if you're already using LiteSpeed Web Server, you get it free. See below:

 

[webber]

I was surprised to see some of my auctions had reached £400 bids on the Acorn side widget:

Reusing the same variable in a loop without updating it?

 

[DJ]

I was surprised to see some of my auctions had reached £400 bids on the Acorn side widget:
View attachment 3479
Reusing the same variable in a loop without updating it?

I pointed this out to Colin back in August, but I never followed it up.

Just wanted to say thanks for Colin for all the effort in providing the platform for free. I know you are putting in a lot of effort without any real reward. Perhaps you could implement a voluntary donation for a successful auction or marketplace sale to help toward the running of the site (i.e. tick here if you are happy to donate £? if this auction sells), just an idea?

Cheers!

 

[Ben Thomas]

Yeah, Colin if you read this I hope you take all of this on as constructive criticism and don't feel like we're just throwing dirt at you. Because you've done well with it, adding another auction website for domain names into the mix was very useful. Especially since UKBackorder closed it's doors to public auctions and really only DomainLore was left.

 

[webber]

voluntary donation

flip.uk/donations but I know what you mean and I agree a gentle reminder to make a donation might help. Maybe a reminder that puts it in some useful context eg: you sold x domains for £x,xxx in the past x months, would you like to help Flip by making a donation which will contribute to its running costs?
Might also help to show previous donations (kind of like this), tends to have a positive psychological impact.

 

[DJ]

flip.uk/donations but I know what you mean and I agree a gentle reminder to make a donation might help. Maybe a reminder that puts it in some useful context eg: you sold x domains for £x,xxx in the past x months, would you like to help Flip by making a donation which will contribute to its running costs?
Might also help to show previous donations (kind of like this), tends to have a positive psychological impact.

To me, a donations page implies making a one off / one time donation (TBH I didn't know about it).

I was thinking more along the lines of being asked every time you submit an auction, or perhaps when an auction sells. A bit like leaving a tip on uber eats. Similar to what you suggest I guess, but maybe: Congratulations your domain sold for £xxx, by using our platform we estimate that you saved £xx in fees, would you like to make a donation towards keeping this site running and free to use.

If somebody has made a quick profit they may be inclined to do this, where as if somebody is breaking even or has made a loss on a name (we all have) they can choose not to.

 

[lazarus]

Hi all,

The Acorn popular auction feed box is now fixed (Hopefully)

I can confirm that it is not using WordPress. I was for the few weeks for the splash / add interest site. It is using a heavily adapted commercial solution.

It is not sitting on your standard cPanel/Plesk web hosting account. It's built on a Dedicated server running a minimal Linux distro with a custom LAMP configuration.

For DNS to work the way it does for domain parking. I needed full control over the DNS server in order to configure it in a very specific way. If you point a domain at flip you get the main page or the listing page if one exists. Conventionally for this to work on a standard DNS server a domain alias or a cname record would need to be created. Flip handles these incoming requests on the fly without the need for an entry in DNS.

Because of the 'magic' that happens at the DNS level, I cannot easily flick it over to use something like Cloudflare

Even good traffic like Google bot... When a search engine decides to crawl your site it takes up a little bit of resource. In flips example. Times that by X thousand domains that are pointing to flip and times amount again by the many other search engine companies. That's a lot of traffic! 95% of the time it handles traffic very well

I have lots of ideas going forward on how to develop it further. Unfortunately for me, over the past few months, I have been recovering from emergency surgery due to the sudden onset of something called cauda equina syndrome. It's a slow recovery process but getting better now and also very thankful and lucky to catch it just in time. As a result, it has limited the amount of time I can spend sitting in a fixed position when working on the computer.

Cheers, Laz

 

[DJ]

Really sorry to hear that Colin, hopefully the recovery goes well.

Take care!

 

[Ben Thomas]

Cheers, Laz

Thanks for the insight, Colin! Wishing you a speedy recovery. I did a quick Google search and it sounds painful. Sure hope you get well soon.