On WordPress core, plugins, themes, etc.
(not so) tiny but true web hosting reviews!
Today is the day when Google has started implementing mobile friendliness as a search engine ranking factor. The actual announcement in this regard was done two months ago in the official WebMasterCentral blog. It also started showing a tiny warning in the official blog since then. If you use WordPress and if your site is not mobile friendly, yet, there are options to convert it (for free) to fit into mobiles nicely.
Continue reading “Is Your Awesome Site Mobile Friendly Too?”
Last month, a WordPress site with a fairly active forum (related to Beatles) needed to be migrated to another server. The forum had a new post at least every 30 minutes, including on week ends when the traffic to the site is the lowest.
This is the rough overview of the process: Continue reading “Mitigating DNS worries while changing hosts!”
During the past 24 hours, there were two people had the following situation and were looking for a solution. Their use-case is…
I’m currently using a Nginx frontend / Apache backend setup. The W3 Total Cache plugin detects Apache and will only show me the Apache rewrite rules.
Here’s another quote from the other person who was looking for a similar solution…
The nginx.conf file does not exist. W3 Total Cache plugin detects that Apache is running – thus gives me the rewrites for that webserver instead. I am using Nignx in front of Apache – not a Nginx/PHP-FPM solution
Interesting, but not uncommon. So, I dived in and modified my existing Nginx rules for WP Super Cache plugin and provided a unique solution. Continue reading “W3 Total Cache configuration for Nginx-Apache server stack”
Update (Feb 5, 2013): The beta version that I tested, has been released as version 0.9.2.6 with more features than mentioned below. So, this post is void as of February 5, 2013 (in less than 2 weeks of publishing it). :(-
W3 Total Cache is back in active development, nearly after a year. I’m one of the lucky people who got the opportunity to test the beta version of the upcoming release, probably 1.0.0.0! It brings a few new features, including a more-intuitive troubleshooter. Continue reading “W3 Total Cache 1.0? – Sneak Peek!”
There was an interesting question in the Nginx mailing list regarding replacing Varnish with Nginx as a load balancer. Let me quote the question directly here…
We are using Varnish in front of 3 load balanced web servers running apache. We had migrated from one hosting platform where we had 1 app server and 1 database server using Varnish (Drupal 6.x) and had no issues. Now that we are running in a load balanced environment (3 load balanced apache web servers, a Varnish server, and 1 database server) we are seeing mulitple examples of cacheing issues. (Pages not displaying correctly… style issues, data input staying cached and used on another page, etc).
We think we can just replace the Varnish server and use a NGinx server. I don’t want to necessarily remove all the apache servers, but we have to get this cacheing issue corrected….
any thoughts…?
There were two major outages on many sites during the past few weeks.
Both these incidents affected many sites hosted in US East. Specifically, there were multiple sites that went offline during the recent Amazon AWS EBS degradation (nice alternative for downtime). Most sites waited helplessly until Amazon fixed it or waited until the after-effects of Sandy to go off. Others did the smartest thing. Moving the entire site to the US West coast. Continue reading “What Do You Do For A Day When Your Web Hosting Service Crashes?”
You don’t hear this often… MySQL server crashed and the sites hosted in that server went offline for hours together. But, when a similar thing happened to my VPS, it wasn’t the case. My site was still online, while I was troubleshooting the issue with MySQL server. Ultimately, I could not figure out the issue and I had to purge the entire MySQL installation. However, I was still cool during the entire process. You may ask how. Here is what happened and how you can prevent the same for your own VPS too… Continue reading “MySQL Server Crashed – My Site was still online!”
Last month, Gandi.net sent a tweet providing free hosting for a month on their simple hosting package. As I already purchased a domain from them and was already looking for a host, I immediately replied and received the promo code within minutes. I’ve been using their service for about 20 days now. So, here is a quick review on how it went on so far, how it fares comparing to other hosting providers, its advantages over others and its unique disadvantages! Continue reading “Varnish for the masses – Gandi.net Simple Hosting Review”
