topic Re: Website content being cached somewhere? in Everything else

Website content being cached somewhere?

Emseedee — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 22:16:38 GMT

I have.a fixed IP and a small web server running nginx, with an SSL cert from let’s encrypt. I’ve just updated the website and although I can see the new version of the site on port 80 (using the IP address) on the local network, if I look at the domain name, which automatically defaults to port 443, I still get the old version.

As far as I can tell, my server isn’t caching anything, but something is. Does PN use Cloudflare or something similar as a nameserver? If so, is there any way I can get it to clear the cache? Or is there some other way of sorting this?

TIA. Mike

Re: Website content being cached somewhere?

Emseedee — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 20:09:38 GMT

After several days, whatever was caching it has now stopped, so the problem has gone away.

Re: Website content being cached somewhere?

corringham — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:58:06 GMT

Web sites can have a max-age for cache entries - if not given explicitly by the site the default tends to be of the order of 2 or 3 hours.

Web pages may be cached in many places, from your own server right through to the viewer's web browser. This is simply to minimize unnecessary traffic - since many web pages don't change frequently there is usually no need to go all the way to the hosting server for a copy of the page.

It's likely that whatever max-age was used has now passed so your pages have been updated in the cache(s). Caching won't have stopped, just been updated.

Re: Website content being cached somewhere?

quelquod — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 17:06:56 GMT

I get the same "problem" though it's an ordinary website and I don't run a server and it's more than annoying to have to wait several days to be able to check whether a change that I've made is done correctly. It never used to be like this and changes for instance to a Wordpress blog were more or less immediate so something has changed.

HOWEVER if instead of using my domain name I use instead ccgi.domainname.force9.co.uk any changes show straightaway so I'm not sure where the apparent caching happens.

From my point of view unless you've a completely static website it makes things useless. Luckily I've other options.

Re: Website content being cached somewhere?

corringham — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 19:22:32 GMT

@quelquod you should be able to specify the cache max-age for your website and thereby override any defaults. The way to specify that will depend on how you've built your website (HTML, javascript, Wordpress etc.) but should be straightforward.

Re: Website content being cached somewhere?

quelquod — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 14:51:43 GMT

I don't think it's strictly a caching problem because new pages don't appear either (over a week now and changes made are not visible on the www but are definitely there on the Hostopia (?) server). This isn't something I can address so I'll raise a new topic and hope that one of the Plusnet Tech support guys sees it.

Re: Website content being cached somewhere?

Champnet — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 15:27:31 GMT

I seem to remember entries in the .htaccess file can speed up or slow down cache controls.