Application cache

Caching technology is key in building high-performance websites. Reusing results is superior to regenerating them both in terms of speed and resource usage.

Both Drupal and WordPress use internal caching but by default they’re configured to use the storage service that’s most common: the database. This avoids a dependency on external services but can only provide diminishing returns: While we save a higher number of database queries, we pay for it with new database queries.

Memcached

Because we built freistilbox as a fully-fledged managed hosting platform, we were happy to sacrifice this constrained simplicity for maximum website performance. freistilbox allows you to move your application’s caching data from database tables to a memory-based Application Cache named Memcached. Memcached (pronunciation: mem-cash-dee) is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system. Since all its read and write operations are done in RAM only, it achieves a much higher transaction rate than a database cache.

freistilbox customers using Memcached will experience a significant increase in application performance as well as lower database load.

Redis

Redis is a database that stores documents as a whole instead of structured data fields. Since it operates fully in RAM, using disk storage only for persistence, it is a good alternative to Memcached for building an application cache.

At the moment, we offer Redis on demand as a beta feature. Simply contact support to have it added to your hosting setup.