I’m very excited to help out with Chattanooga’s premier TEDx event: TEDxChattanooga. For this site, I chose a responsive Bootstrap 3 SASS WordPress theme, originally developed for TEDxToronto. I made a few tweaks and improvements to better fit our event, and worked with April Cox from UT Chattanooga to dial in the design and architecture. Developed on […]
Trawire.com offers portable 4G MiFi and iPad rentals for visitors traveling to Iceland. Trawire’s CIO approached me for assistance after his systems administrator bailed and left him with a poorly maintained, self-hosted MacMini server running unoptimized WordPress installs. I migrated the site to Amazon Web Services, where it now can handle traffic spikes and can be […]
I have been working on a Varnish front-end for Apache, to be used with WordPress sites. I described the architecture in Load Balancing Virtualmin WordPress Hosting Server with Varnish on AWS. I now have a configuration that seems to work for all WordPress features, including logged-out commenting. This configuration also works well with W3 Total […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
My Virtualmin Amazon Linux Server runs several virtual domains with PHP under FCGId using APC for opcode caching: Joomla, PHPbb, WordPress, etc . APC is somewhat challenging to configure properly with fcgid-enabled virtual domains, but it is quite helpful to optimize system resources and prevent traffic surges on one site from affecting overall server performance. Joomla […]