WordPress Hosting is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

What is a CDN?

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network. Basically, it's a bunch of highly optimized servers all across the world, with a bit of unique logic worked into them: you'll always hit the server that's closest to you. This leads to huge performance improvements for sites that have visitors from all across the world, like this one.

My images were coming from the US, which was better for like 50% of my readers but pretty slow for a lot of my European readers (about 35% of my readers are European). Now, for them, these images can come from the CDNs servers in London, Amsterdam or Frankfurt, whichever is closest to them.

The other servers of this CDN are, in North America: Ashburn, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose and Seattle. In Europe, as said; Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London, as well as Sydney Australia and Hong Kong and Tokyo in Asia. (There's actually a map on VI's cloud hosting page, another sister company of the same group of hosting providers). So my server now distributes its images, js and css files to those 15 servers, which in turn serve them out to you!

The CDN works with so called Pull URL's. This means you specify a directory on your server that it pulls all files from, which it then starts serving from the CDN. This allows for a few quite neat tricks, for starters, to serve all your uploaded files from the CDN quite easily, once you've done some WordPress stuff that I'll of course take care of for you.

I've moved several things onto the CDN:

1. my themes image files
2. my themes js files
3. my themes css files
4. the js files that come with WordPress that are not hosted by Google (eg. thickbox)
5. all my uploaded files

Most of this was pretty easy, though there's some tricks involved in all of this. I'm working on moving those tricks into a plugin, which I'll try to release at the same time as when the CDN becomes available at VPS.net.

Who should be using a CDN?

Because it distributes your data across the globe, a CDN is beneficial for pretty much everyone. Larger blogs and sites with a lot of traffic, sites serving videos or other downloadable files benefit most, as it speeds up these downloads. Other sites that benefit are sites that are often on Digg or other huge sites - as it spreads the load across a network of servers, rather than just one.

The CDN has pretty cool live stats in the backend, that look like this:

I'm planning on integrating some of these statistics into the WordPress plugin I'm building for all this.

This CDN stuff must be expensive!

You were thinking that, right? Well, that's what I thought too. Turns out I'm wrong, they told me pricing for the CDN will be $0.05 a GB, pay-as-you-go, with a minimum purchase of $50. So you could buy 1TB for $50 and it could last anywhere up to even a year... And as one account can be used on multiple sites, if you put it on a whitelabel type domain, it'll be very useful to a pretty big group of people. It's also good to know that most good CDNs (including this one) don't charge for storage, just for bandwidth.

I'd love to know what you guys and girls think of the new speed, and whether this is something you can use too, let me know in the comments!

BTW. If you want an account like, now, and don't want to wait, let me know in the comments and I'll hook you up with the guys at VPS.net!

Using a CDN for your WordPress blog is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So the guys who run WestHost and provide me with my awesome WordPress hosting, are a sister company of the guys that run VPS.net, and they recently gave me a VPS to play around with a bit. I kinda liked how easy it was to get a VPS up and running with a TurnKey Linux / WordPress image on it, the only issue was it was version 2.5 and needed updating.

Though they told me that would be changed pretty soon (meaning the image will support a higher WP version), I made a quick video on how to do all this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have to say it was a pretty nice experience, if you're looking for a VPS, this is pretty much top notch stuff (being a nice combo between a VPS and cloud based hosting) and it isn't expensive.

Playing around with VPS.net is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

How to get the most out your Magento install?

Magento is notorious for it speed and performance. But isn't necessary to have a killer web server to get very reasonable performance, it is all about the configuration of your server and the code of your template. However, after the 1.3 release there are some performance improvements, like Frontend Flat Catalog, and people measure reduction of loading times up to 40%. Another recent development is the Magento Compiler this module compiles all Magento files. From tests this module gave between 25% to 50% better performance. This module is still in beta and should not be used in a production environment for now.

The question is, what else can you do to speed up your Magento install?

Optimize your template for speed

More information can be found at the Magento SEO article.

Enable compression of your files

Mod_deflate allows output from your server to be compressed. To enable it for Magento edit your .htaccess, around line 74, in Magento root directory.

<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</ifmodule>

Apache Module mod_expires

mod_expires controls the setting of the Expires HTTP header and the max-age directive of the Cache-Control HTTP header in server responses. To enable Expires HTTP header for Magento you had to change the code under at your .htaccess to.

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
</ifmodule>

Use PHP Accelerator

Install a PHP opcode cacher such as APC or XCache. This seems to deliver rather large improvement in the responsive of the Magento install. Some people note a reduce of loading time up to 70%.

Tune your MySQL configuration

You can modify the configuration of the MySQL server to take advantage of the server's RAM. The efficiency of this step are different, it seems to depends mainly on the number of products. When you have only 100 products, difference will be hardly to notice (below 100ms). But for shops with over 50.000 products there is a huge reduction of the loading time. To give an idea about the settings, for shops with only a limit number of products a query_cache_limit of 1MB will be enough. For larger stores the optimal query cache value can be 64MB. To get the optimal value you really need some testing. A good start point for your Query Cache configuration can be found here.

Speed up your Cache files

Magento makes extensive use of file-based storage for caching and session storage. The slowest component in a server is the hard drive, so if you use a memory-based file system such as tmpfs, you can save all those extra disk IO cycles by storing these temporary files in memory instead of storing them on your slow hard drive.

Let´s do this with tmpfs

Let's say your Magento install is at /var/www/domain.com/ so your cache and session directories are /var/www/domain.com/var/cache/ and /var/www/domain.com/var/session/ For cache we will allocate a max of 256MB RAM and for sessions 64MB RAM. It is important to give access to everyone (e.g your webserver Apache)

mount -t tmpfs -o size=256M,mode=0744 tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/cache/
mount -t tmpfs -o size=64M,mode=0744 tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/session/

Now it might be a good idea to restore these volumes each time your server boots. Just add the following lines to your /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/cache/ tmpfs size=256,mode=0744 0 0
tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/session/ tmpfs size=64,mode=0744 0 0

Please note, your tmpfs is temporary in the sense that nothing will be created on your hard drive. If you reboot, everything in tmpfs will be lost.

Save the sessions in your database

Another option for the sessions is to save them in your database. Magento supports this very well and it is one small step to make this work. Just edit app/etc/local.xml and set

<session_save><![CDATA[files]]></session_save>

to

<session_save><![CDATA[db]]></session_save>

it will then save all sessions in the database which is a much quicker access than the filesystem. When you use a cluster enviroment you had to use this option.

Enable Apache KeepAlives

Enable Apache KeepAlives, this allows persistent connections. These long-lived HTTP sessions allow multiple requests to be send over the same TCP connection, this can result in an almost 50% speedup in latency times for HTML documents with lots of images. An example setting can be:

KeepAlive On
KeepAliveTimeout 2

Need more Magento Performance?

Ok, you are a very successful online retailer and it is time to cluster, no problem. This means that one single-server doesn't have enough power to keep your customers happy and so you need a clustered environment with two or more servers. A first step can be to start using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). In the low end a Amazon CloudFront/S3 as CDN can be very interesting option.

The most easy to start is using an separate media server, e.g. media.domain.com. Magento has native support for this. You can configure 'Base Media URL' secure and unsecure under web configurations. This allow you to serve media form one server without the needs to synchronize any directory. Another option is to start using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for delivering the static files like images. In the low end a Amazon CloudFront/S3 as CDN can be a very interesting option.

Another option is to use more than one database servers this tactic is called "database replication". One database will be the "master" and all others will be called "slaves". The master is the only database that accepts any sort of write-base queries. These write queries are then replicated to any of the slave servers in real-time. A post at the Magento blog will get you on the right track.

To summarize, 5 quick wins

• move the the rules in the .htaccess files from the directories to virtualhost configuration directives
• install Xcache or APC PHP cache accelerator
• clean up your template and layout
• make sure Apache KeepAlives is enabled
• use a memory-based file system for Magento's var/cache/ and var/session/ directory

Conclusion

This article give a introduction how to improve your Magento site performance, none of these tips are revolutionary. Because every website's scenario is different, when you really want to get the most out of your Magento install you need to hire a professional. The only way to discover the optimal server configuration is testing, a really great tool to use is Browsermob, load testing with real web browsers so you will able to put even the Magento checkout process under load testing.

Now, all of the above you can’t do on your average host, you need a VPS that provides you full control of your server environment. Check out WestHost’s sister company, VPS.net, for a VPS environment that would give you full control.

Magento performance hosting is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I was checking the list of WordPress recommended hosting parties (you can find that here), and noticed one that I hadn't seen on there before, called WestHost. Turns out these guys were #1 most reliable hosting provider according to Netcraft four times in 2008, including November and December.

Their admins and support people also are top-notch (and all US based), I've never seen a migration handled as smoothly as they did. So, I can now honestly say I can recommend you to use WestHost for all your WordPress hosting needs, at $6.95 a month for their blog package, which even includes one free domain, they're not exactly what I'd call expensive either.

So, if you're wondering about which WordPress hosting package to go for, here's the answer: go for WestHost.

WestHost: WordPress hosting done right is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

1. Do you know first when your blog is down?

I've had this happen to me in the past quite often, people emailing me or calling me telling me my site was down. A few months ago, when I decided that my blog was one of my most important business ventures, I started making moves to make sure I was the first to know when my blog went down.

That's why I've started using Pingdom. Pingdom checks my site every minute, and will tell me by email and SMS if it hasn't gotten a signal for 2 times in a row (you can configure that very easily) and on top of that, it gives me graphs like the one below, which measure my site's response time.

You can add checks for 5 sites in a normal account, so you can either share it with some other people, or use it for a couple of blogs. Of course you can add more sites, you'll have to pay more though.

2. Do you use reliable hosting?

When I wrote my last post on WordPress hosting, I was surprised by some of the reactions. The "yeah they're not that good but they're cheap" kind of comments made me wonder whether these people are really serious about what they do with their blog. Whether you're blogging for a profit, or to build a name for yourself, a lot of downtime will reflect badly on you.

It really is better to pay a bit more for hosting to prevent those 10 downtimes a year, and trust me, you'll sleep better too!

3. How do you treat your regulars?

Any business that can have the benefit of regular customers should be working hard to turn normal customers into regular customers and then treat those people well. For me there are three kinds of very important regular customers / visitors to this site:

1. Feed subscribers, through RSS or e-mail
2. Mailing List subscribers
3. "Normal" Regular visitors

Are you making sure these people get what they expect from you? Or, even better, are you giving them a special treat sometimes? For instance, my last plugin, a plugin that improves your posts slugs, is only available for subscribers to my mailing list. That turned out to work very well!

Another thing I do is thanking first time commenters, by using my comment-redirect plugin, and asking them to subscribe to my feed. This is both because I love the fact that they commented and gave their opinion or shared their wisdom (as should you when you've finished reading this post!), and because if someone is engaged enough to comment, that's also the perfect moment to ask them to sign up for your RSS or mailing list.

4. Do you know what people love you for?

The most important thing to know when you have recurring visitors, is to know why these people are coming back. Why? Well if for instance, you write a lot about cats and do the occasional post about dogs, but most people read your blog because they like your dog posts so much, maybe you should be doing a bit more of that, right?

How you know what people like you for? Use vanity searches everywhere. For instance, I have a vanity search on Twitter, that recently showed me this tweet:

Now that tells me that this person likes my WordPress tips, good, I've got loads of them! Now you should be making sure you know stuff like this too by using searches like this on Twitter and Google Alerts on your own name and your blogs name. You'll always know what people feel about you and your blog!

5. Is your blog well kept?

When your blog gets older, pages and posts will sometimes move, or other things may occur that lead to search engines having listings for pages on your blog that no longer exist. Or other sites might be linking to pages that no longer exist. Do you know if that's the case on your blog? Do you keep track of your 404 (aka "page not found) errors?

If you don't, now is the time to start doing that. If you use WordPress, my way of doing that is installing the 404 notifier plugin, and adding the RSS feed that provides to my feed reader. Any 404 that should be fixed I then fix immediately with Redirection.

Another question to ask yourself about your blog:

6. Is your sidebar there for your readers?

I see so many cluttered side bars these days that I'm getting sick of them. There's a couple of things I might be slightly interested in, like your FeedBurner stats, your Twitter followers and your Technorati authority, or your ranking on any major blog list, but you have to keep asking yourself: do I add yet another button because I like it, or because I think it will benefit my readers?

If your answer is "it's only for me", consider making a small page on your blog for yourself that keeps track of those things, and don't annoy your readers with it!

6 Serious Questions for Serious Bloggers is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Update: I've had a run in with a couple of hosting providers, but I'm now hosted by two different UK2Group labels: VPS.net and WestHost, and so should you be, read more about WordPress hosting here!

One of the most important things when you're starting a new blog is to consider where'll you host it. This decision also relies on smaller choices like which platform you will use, how much bandwidth you will be using, how much disk space you need, etc. etc.

This post should help you decide what you need hosting wise, to prevent you from having to move your blog when it get's popular.

Update: After reading this post, please, please, share your experiences in the comments. To make this post truly valuable, we need to be able to draw from your experience too!

WordPress.org itself suggests that you host with one of the following companies:

• Dreamhost (keep reading for a big discount!)
• AN Hosting
• Host I Can
• BlueHost
• MediaTemple
• Laughing Squid

I have to disclose that MediaTemple sponsors this blog, but I'll try to be as fair as possible in my judgement by comparing these hosting parties on fixed factors.

The stats I've compared them on, and some of my findings:

• Maximum disk size
  With Laughing Squid offering a meager 300 MB, they disqualify themselves almost straight away, as the rest of the hosting parties offer 100 GB upwards of storage. Unless you plan on doing a photo blog with loads of pictures every day, I doubt you'll reach the 100 GB limit soon, so other then Laughing Squid, there are no real losers here.

• Included bandwidth per month
  Other than what a lot of people think, the internet isn't free. It seems to be almost free though, as most parties include decent amounts of traffic. Be aware though that if you are going to host your own video or a lot of images (and why would you want to do that?), you'll have to take a good look at this.

• Number of email addresses and aliases included
  While I doubt this will be the breaking point for you in a hosting decision, it IS important to know upfront.

• Whether you can access your hosting account through FTP and SSH
  Not everyone will need SSH access, everyone will need FTP access at some point. Well everybody provides for FTP access, but if you need SSH access, be sure to check the table.

• Does hosting party have a One Click Installer for WordPress?
  You can safely live without it, but if it saves you a couple of minutes (or hours) work, it might be a reason to "go for it".

• Is a free domain included?
  Really important? Probably not, but they are contained in the price, so it needs to be here for an honest comparison.

• The price when you prepay this package for 1 year
  In all cases I've gone for the cheapest package, prepaid for 1 year, so that the comparison is honest.

• How many issues there are on the WordPress.org support forums?
  Probably one of the best measurement of both how many people use a host and how much trouble they give is the number of cases for the hosting party in the support forums. This number has two sides though, you'll probably want to check for yourself how the cases are handled if you think you'll need a lot of support.

The results:

	AN Hosting	bluehost	Dreamhost	Host I Can	Laughing Squid	Media Temple
Disk Size	500 GB	Unlimited	500 GB	2 TB	300 MB	100 GB
Bandwidth	5 TB	Unlimited	5 TB	20 TB	20 GB	1 TB
Email	?	2500	Unlimited	Unlimited	5	1000
FTP access
SSH access
One Click Installer
Domain included?	1 free	1 free	1 free	1 free	No	1 free
Price with 1 year prepaid	$83.95	$95.40	$69.40	$76.32	$106	$200
Issues on WP.org forums	18	463	371	25	11	100

To be honest: if you're not TechCrunch, you'll probably do fine with every hosting party as far as disk size, bandwidth, email is concerned, as long as you don't go for Laughing Squid. What's left is pricing, and with my discount code ($50 off for the first year if you use promo code "yoast"), DreamHost is by far the cheapest.

If you look at all of this the biggest question is: which of these hosts can survive a Digg frontpage. Honestly: I can't test that. MediaTemple boasts that their GridService is the best service for this kind of situation, and I can tell you that it does indeed work, but the pricing is high.

So, currently, my advice would be to go to Dreamhost, or, if you think you'll hit a lot of big social media sites often and you can afford the somewhat higher price, Media Temple.

Whatever you choose, good luck with your WordPress blog, and remember to sign up for my WordPress newsletter!

WordPress Hosting Parties Reviewed is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I found out the hard way because Nina upgraded her blog, and her permalinks broke. We had to insert a category and tag base, which she didn't have before, to make it work (that is the "official" work around), but it isn't the nice clean solution you'd like.

On a side note, if you're considering WordPress, and want to host it yourself, I highly recommend Linux WordPress hosting over Windows hosting: you should go with WestHost, if you ask me...

WordPress 2.6 Windows hosting issue is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Another nice thing a friend pointed me at today is that if you're sending out email, at all, and you host or register your domains through GoDaddy, you might be in for some pain. Apparently, they can take your domain hostage if someone files a spam complaint... GoDaddy never had the best reputation, but this is another reason to urge you to switch away from them.

Annoyances and weird stuff is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!