5 best CMS platforms for 2021

Are you looking for Content Management System (CMS) platforms? Welcome on board! CMS platforms are a great way to build a website without being an expert on programming or writing codes.

The only issue is that variety is massive already. To pick well is the key to save you time, effort, and money. Moving from one to another is possible, but it will delay your online success.

Let’s narrow the menu for you not to be dizzy!

Word Press

Open-source available since 2003. Based on MySQL (database) and PHP, a scripting language for managing dynamic content. You can build from a blog to a big e-shop with it.

Advantages:

It’s free.
Available in more than sixty languages.
Robust infrastructure to build any type of site.
Flexible. There are literally thousands of native Word Press but also third-party apps, themes, plugins… Free, paid ones compatible and available for installing. Customization for your website has massive possibilities.
It downloads all your content in XML format, in case you want to migrate to a different system.
SEO friendly.
Big and supportive community.

Disadvantages:

New additions are making it a heavy platform and a bit confusing.
They limited out-of-the-box functionality. Additional plugins are needed.

Drupal

CMS open-source since 2001. Popular and powerful PHP-written CMS.

Advantages:

It’s free.
Built-in system to make things easier.
Its flexible and modular structure allows many different modules (plugins) for you to customize as much as you want.
Plenty of plugins (Drupal native and third-party too) are available for expanding your website’s functionality.
It supports lots of data.
SEO friendly.
Active community, ready to help.

Disadvantages:

Some modules require manual configuration via FTP. Not compatible extensions with the backend will require a process to be updated. It can be a bit complex for beginners.
If your business needs are demanding, the basic Drupal installation will need a lot of additions.

Joomla

It was released in 2005. It’s a reliable and popular open-source CMS. PHP and MySQL based.

Advantages:

It’s free.
Robust and flexible infrastructure. Any kind of website can be built with it, maintain, and scale.
Thousands of free and paid extensions are compatible and available to increase your website’s functionality. What to add totally depends on your business’ needs.
Built-in multilingual support.
Multi theme use.
Wide and helpful community.

Disadvantages:

Managing the whole system’s possibilities could be a challenge for beginners. You can need guidance.
Available extensions are thousands, but less than for otherCMSs.

Ghost

Open-source specifically for blogging. Written in JavaScript. Ideal CMS for big companies and individuals. Available since 2013.

Advantages:

It’s free.
A friendly, neat editor that allows text formatting even when adding special characters.
Built-in SEO’s optimization.
The necessary tools for charging users to get your content (subscriptions) are available.

Disadvantages.:

Less flexible than other CMSs if you change the kind of business.
It’s a popular CMS but still not compatible with all hosting providers, like more used CMSs.
For advanced functions, a bit of code must be understood.

Magento

Released in 2008, Magento is a reliable open-source for e-Commerce. Written in PHP, a powerful CMS.

Advantages:

Free and paid versions. We’ll talk about the free one.
Pretty customizable.
Flexible, a lot of third-party extensions can be added to expand your site’s functionality.
It allows you to build all shop sizes, managing plenty of customers and products. There’s room for your business to grow.
Choices for getting payments, money transfers are many, and some are already built-in.

Disadvantages:

It can be hard for beginners. Building an e-shop from scratch is a big task.
Just the paid version (expensive) includes customer support. Getting the free one, you rely on Magento’s community.

Conclusion

These 5 best CMS platforms are top-notch. They power really big online e-shops, government institutions, publishers, and more. Remember, the software is free, but you still need a hosting provider to run them.

DNS load balancing

Now we are going to explore something that a few people know – DNS load balancing.

You have probably heard about cache plugins and CDN (Content Delivery Network). Now we are going to talk about another network element that increases the speed by managing the DNS requests faster than a single server. It will boast the first step of someone’s visit to a site and redirect the traffic for better performance.

What is DNS load balancing?

DNS load balancing is a technique for administrating the traffic of a hostname. Many of these DNS load balancers are smart. They use different criteria, analyze the traffic, decide to let it go or stop it, and redirect it to another server based on current load or another parameter.

Find out more information about DNS Load Balancing!

The DNS load balancer is responsible for the redirection of requests of DNS records. It could work together with a complete CDN. That way, the system will not only direct the DNS traffic fast but also to provide cached data like photos or videos directly to the users.

The load balancer can be set to administrate the traffic based on:

Location of the query. Suppose you are using a Traffic Director or GeoDNS. In that case, your DNS could understand where the traffic is coming and redirect to a particular IP address that will provide better overall performance.
If a server is busy. The traffic can also be managed based on the occupation of the servers. That way, if a server is already too busy, the queries could go to another DNS server (closest next one), and the network will continue to function.
Based on the arrival of the query. There is a very basic balancing method, where the queries go to another server, based just on the time of their arrival. The first goes to one, the second to two, and so on, then it starts again.
Weighted balancing. It could be based on the server’s computing power or another value, which determines which server should get more traffic.

There are more types and combinations, especially with weighted balancing methods, but these are the basic ideas behind load balancing.

Why does DNS load balancing matter?

There are two main purposes to implement DNS load balancing:

Speed. The most obvious reason is the increased speed. There is no doubt about it. If there is a DNS network of servers with different locations around the globe, your client will get their DNS queries resolved much faster. The speed is a serious factor for SEO, so you definitely can get an edge over your competitor with a well-built DNS balancer.
Security. As we already mentioned, it could analyze the incoming traffic. It can check the packets of data for errors and stop malicious attempts to poison your DNS server. It could prevent serious problems that could lead to data breaches, phishing attacks to your clients, downtime, and more.
Reliability. As the name suggests, it balances the load. Managing the traffic between the different DNS servers can stop not only DDoS attacks but could be useful even in normal situations. Imagine you have a promotion on your site, and you are expecting a peak of traffic during a particular period. Without extra help, your site could crash, and you will have plenty of angry customers. This could potentially damage your brand strongly.

Conclusion

DNS load balancer is a method of distributing the incoming traffic through the network of DNS servers so that the traffic could be appropriately managed.

What is DDoS Protected DNS, and do I need it?

Statistics about Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks’ growth and frequency around the world are scary. Nobody wants to experience them, but there is no way to deny, anybody can be targeted.

The time a DDoS attack can last is not a minor issue. Some have lasted a few hours, but others, days. Every hour your business is shut down means losses for you. Plus the cost for fixing the DDoS side effects on your site.

So from now, the answer is yes. If you have an online business, you definitely need protection against DDoS attacks.

What is a DDoS attack?

There are different ways for DDoS attacks to occur. In general, they choose a target (server, computer, or complete network) to overwhelm it through massive amounts of traffic coming from multiple infected sources (worldwide distributed devices).

Daily the number of connected devices to the Internet increases and the scope of such attacks gets multiplied. Think how easy it could be to infect all the insecure wearables and IoT (watches, wristbands, toys, fridges, toasters, home lights, cameras…) for attacking through them. Attack amplification can grow crazily.

Some common DDoS techniques are:

Attacks through volume (floods). The objective is to clutter the target’s bandwidth with crazy loads of traffic. The scale for measuring them is bits per second (Bps).
Attacks via a protocol. Protocols are rules for exchanging data on the Internet. Taking advantage of such rules, hackers can control the system. Through big loads of malicious packets, target protocols (TCP/IP, load balancers, firewalls, etc.) get consumed abnormally fast. The measurement scale used is packets per second (Pps).
Attacks through the application layer. The victim is an edge server running a web app. Detection gets harder since bringing down an app is easier. It requires a more moderate amount of requests (traffic) to drown memory and CPU. They are measure in requests per second (Rps).

What is a DNS amplification attack?

To scale the damage is a clear DDoS objective. To get it, DNS amplification is used. Let’s explain it broadly.

A target is chosen.
A fake IP address for the target is forged.
DNS requests are sent to a DNS server with the forged IP address. More and more requests can be made to different DNS resolvers.
The target receives a massive response.
Resources get depleted.
The target is brought down.

What is DDoS Protected DNS?

The DDoS protected DNS is a robust network with strategically located servers in the world. What servers smartly do is to balance the traffic’s load. To be aware in case of an attack. Once spikes in traffic are detected, servers in the network distribute the load. If the attacker manages to bring down a server, more will still be working for your business, not suffer downtime.

This is extra protection for your business that is not included in basic DNS plans. What providers mostly offer for mitigating DDoS is:

24/7 monitoring. DDoS attacks produce some traceable signs such as rare requests’ patterns, suspicious traffic related to an IP address or similar IPs, uncommon traffic loads, spikes, strange traffic in specific pages of your website, etc.
Load balancing. The wider a network is, the easier it is to balance big traffic among servers and guarantee up-time for your business. Prevention is the best choice when it is about online security.
Modern software. Efficient DDoS protection should prevent and also be ready to react in case of an event: firewalls, traffic filtering, notifications (alarms), real-time bot detection, and more.

Conclusion

DDoS protected DNS is a convenient investment for businesses looking for constant uptime and security. If you doubt, just think how much risk are you willing to afford for your business?