• I recently attended a WordCamp event and saw a great talk about optimized hosting for WordPress.

    Of the recommendations, there were two which we were not already doing;

    1) Install a PHP Opcode Cache and allocate 128MB RAM.
    2) Configure Apache to launch PHP-FPM in FastCGI mode and communicate using Unix Sockets.

    Server configuration is outside my skill-set. This was the response from our host company on both issues.

    1) Install a PHP Opcode Cache and allocate 128MB RAM.
    For this requirement, we will have to run easy apache on your server.

    EasyApache is software that installs, modifies, and validates your Apache web server, PHP, Tomcat, and other components of your web server.
    There can be some downtime while running easy apache. So please confirm us the exact date and time to run easy apache.

    2) Configure Apache to launch PHP-FPM in FastCGI mode and communicate using Unix Sockets.
    Currently, your server is using SuPHP as apache handler.

    Using fastcgi, you cannot use PHP directives in .htaccess. This is expected by many popular scripts. Some scripts cannot work on fastcgi php handler.

    Still, if you wish to enable fastcgi handler, then we need to run easy apache on your server, which may cause downtime on your server. So please confirm us the exact date and time to run easy apache.

    Just wondering what the communities thoughts are on this and whether there are any concerns here.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • EasyApache is a server tool that basically configures Apache, PHP, etc. While it doesn’t do much itself, it does let you change the servers settings ot suit your own environment.

    Allocating that much RAM is fine. It’s good to see your hosting company allow that… Most will top out around 64MB so you’re doing well to get 128MB.

    As far as running in FastCGI, that’s good, but it does come down to ease of use, and just how loaded your server is. Running as SuPHP does let you do the good things of auto-updates, and allows the scripts to do what they need to do. FastCGI doesn’t allow a lot of that, as well as the issues with .htaccess that your hosting company has mentioned. Being realistic, unless your server is getting bogged down with massive traffic your users won’t notice much of a differnce (if any at all) by switching from one to the other.

    What it comes down to is that those recommendations are great, but unless your site is sarting to overload your server, it’s really not going to make that much difference in the long run.

    Thread Starter Matthew

    (@serpico)

    Thanks @catacaustic – really appreciate the feedback!

    The site doesn’t have a lot of traffic. We use WT3 cache and a CDN which means the front-end is nice and fast, but the back-end is particularly slow and the store checkout is also slow as this is outside the CDN.

    Perhaps I need to do some more diagnostics.

    Unexpectedly, I do not think wordpress could do that. I used it a while ago but did not know about this feature.

    @jerry Which feature? Nothing that has been discusses so far has been a feature of WordPress. it’s all been hosting server settings.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

The topic ‘Optimized Hosting Setup – easy apache’ is closed to new replies.