Brussels: three language trees that all stay fast

The institutions occupy one quarter and the densest concentration of federations, associations and public-affairs consultancies on earth occupies the streets around them. Their sites are policy libraries with a members' door in the side, published in three languages and read by people who arrive from a search result at eleven at night.

So this page separates the two jobs: the public library, which caching makes almost free, and the member portal, which it cannot touch. Plus what an events-day traffic spike actually looks like from the server.

Restricted documents, a subscriber directory, a voting page: all logged in, all personal, all running the full 10–35 ms round trip plus a PHP render on every request. That is comfortable at this distance and it is worth knowing rather than discovering. Keep the round trips per action low, avoid a wizard that fires a request per screen, and let the public library absorb the anonymous traffic.

User roles are what keep the two halves apart safely — the policy team editing public pages cannot overwrite the membership section, and the membership officer cannot publish to the front page. That is an access-control decision with a performance consequence, because a badly scoped plugin loading member logic on public pages is another way to make the whole site uncacheable.

.be carries Belgian commerce and .eu means something specific in this city: it requires establishment in the EU or EEA, so it fits its holders by definition and reads as a local address rather than an affectation. Plenty of federations here hold both, which is prudent — serving both is not.

Pick one canonical hostname and 301 everything else to it in exactly one hop, then verify with curl -sIL. A chain of three redirects costs three round trips plus a TLS handshake before any HTML moves. Registration sits on the same account as the hosting, with DNS aimed correctly from the start and SSL issued as soon as each name resolves here.