If you're using a Wordpress blog, one thing you can do to significantly improve performance is install the WP Super Cache plugin. This will store static copies of pages accessed by users who don't require any dynamic content generation (e.g., users who haven't logged in or posted a comment) which should make up the vast majority of your visitors if your site is getting a lot of traffic. These static copies are set up on the filesystem so that they are easily accessible via some simple rewrite rules, so if the cache file already exists the web server can just serve it directly - the request never needs to be passed to PHP. This effectively turns your blog into a static site, allowing you to handle a lot of traffic using very few resources.

If you're using a Wordpress blog, one thing you can do to significantly improve performance is install the WP Super Cache plugin. This will store static copies of pages accessed by users who don't require any dynamic content generation (e.g., users who haven't logged in or posted a comment) which should make up the vast majority of your visitors if your site is getting a lot of traffic. These static copies are set up on the filesystem so that they are easily accessible via some simple rewrite rules, so if the cache file already exists the web server can just serve it directly - the request never needs to be passed to PHP. This effectively turns your blog into a static site, allowing you to handle a lot of traffic using very few resources.

I recently set up a new server to host website for my clients. I took the opportunity to re-think how I have been serving sites and optimize the whole software stack for better performance. Rather than the usual LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack, I decided to go with LEMP, switching Apache out for Nginx. Although most common PHP applications recommend Apache, they will actually run faster on Nginx. Usually all you just need to do is translate the .htaccess file rules into Nginx’s configuration file.

My first order of business once the new server was set up was to get WordPress running and to optimize its performance. The first few sites that would be going on the new hardware were using WordPress so although I will be going through a similar process for Expression Engine soon, WordPress was my test-case.

I always run the W3 Total Cache plugin with my WordPress installations. By storing copies of each rendered page to disk (as well as many other optimizations), W3TC dramatically decreases the load on the server under heavy traffic. This is particularly the case with the Nginx configuration I am about to show you, which lets most requests be handled by Nginx alone. Nginx was designed first and foremost as a reverse proxy, so it serves static files almost instantly and with minimal processor or memory usage. There are a number of sample configurations around the web for running WordPress with W3TC on Nginx, but none of them quite did it for me. For one thing, they all rely heavily on if statements, which are evil. So here is my take on it….

This module provides a simple host-based access control.

Module nginx_http_access_module makes it possible to control access for specific IP-addresses of clients. Since nginx 08.22 IPv6 is supported.

Access rules are checked according to the order of their declaration. The first rule that matches a particular address or set of addresses is the one that is obeyed.

Unravel The Music is a small startup; by that I mean we have no money, no financing, and we are owned and operated by two people. Therefore it is important that we get the most out of our server in terms of performance and cost and we have to do this without having to spend hours worrying about the server when we could be improving our design or code.

Nginx is a lightweight, high performance web server/reverse proxy and e-mail (IMAP/POP3) proxy. It runs on UNIX, GNU/Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows. According to Netcraft, 6% of all domains on the Internet use nginx webserver. Nginx is one of a handful of servers written to address the C10K problem. Unlike traditional servers, Nginx doesn't rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. Nginx powers several high traffic web sites, such as WordPress, Hulu, Github, and SourceForge. This page collects hints how to improve the security of nginx web servers running on Linux or UNIX like operating systems.