Load Balancing Virtualmin WordPress Hosting Server with Varnish on AWS

By on May 17, 2012 in Amazon Web Services, Consulting, Content Management Systems, Virtualmin, Wordpress

I am creating a true load balancer topography for a WordPress hosting server, if it needs to scale up beyond what the current system can handle. Scaling Levels The current system is the “admin” path shown in the diagram, with no CDN or Load Balancing. It will handle a lot of traffic, but it is [...]

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Automated WordPress Installation Via Custom Virtualmin Script Installer

By on May 17, 2012 in Virtualmin, Wordpress

WordPress (or any other script) can automatically install during Virtualmin > Create Virtual Server. Virtualmin automatically creates users, MySQL database, and installs WordPress in the public_html root, then gives a link to the WordPress Installer. You can even create a custom installer with a set of plugins and themes. To create a custom script installer [...]

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Punk Rock Music Community

By on April 10, 2012 in Consulting, Music, Portfolio, Publishing, Web Server Performance Tuning, Wordpress

Punktastic.com is a community powered site that covers punk music in Britain, but is poised to go worldwide. They cover punk and hardcore shows and festivals, and provide album reviews, video interviews and more. With a growing audience and user base, Punktastic needed a more reliable and robust web server, so they made the move [...]

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WordPress with W3 Total Cache on Nginx with APC (Virtualmin)

By on March 12, 2012 in Web Server Performance Tuning, Wordpress

Virtualmin now includes support for Nginx web server. I deploy many WordPress sites with W3 Total Cache and APC Alternative PHP Cache, so I was very interested to see how Nginx performance compares to Apache for WordPress, and whether APC and W3TC would play nice with Nginx. I prefer to install WordPress in public_html/wordpress for [...]

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Farm to Table Restaurant Website

By on December 24, 2011 in Agriculture, Organic Farms, Restaurant, Retail

Joe Naturals Farm Store Cafe is a “farm to table” cafe and natural foods store located in historic Leiper’s Fork, near Franklin, TN. The owners contacted me through a fellow farmer with whom I have worked on several web projects. The website project was languishing, after being abandoned by a designer who lacked knowledge of [...]

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SoccerNews.com website

Apache and MySql Performance Tuning for High Traffic Website

By on August 26, 2011 in Portfolio, Web Server Performance Tuning

SoccerNews.com is a high traffic WordPress site with over 600,000 unique visitors and over 2,000,000 page impressions per month. It is a content republisher and aggregator, presenting custom XML feeds for (what else?) soccer news from all over the world. The site has a very active user base, providing content in the forms of editorials and [...]

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Tuning Apache and MySQL for Best Performance in a Shared Virtual Hosting Environment

By on August 22, 2011 in Wordpress

Web hosting has changed dramatically in the last few years. The majority of accounts are now running PHP scripts and MySQL, whereas in the past most accounts were only serving static HTML files. This presents challenges in security as well as performance tuning. It is impossible to predict whether a certain configuration will work properly [...]

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APC INFO Monitor

APC Cache Considerations for Virtual Hosting Environments

By on August 22, 2011 in Wordpress

APC cache does not work well in a virtual hosting environment unless PHP is running as FCGID, and every individual virtual host has a unique PHP.ini and a unique fcgiwrapper. This is not the case with many virtual hosting environments because the memory and CPU requirements are too great. I suggest using Virtualmin for a [...]

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Remote publishing to WordPress from Facebook via RSS

By on July 25, 2011 in Wordpress

Most WordPress developers know you can use one of several plugins to publish from WordPress to a Facebook wall, app or fan page. Did you know you can also do the opposite? You can publish from Facebook to WordPress by using the FeedWordPress plugin and the RSS feed from your fan page. This can be [...]

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