Tag Archives: wordpress

Setup WordPress CDN with Dediserve

My blog is running on a blazing fast Litespeed-powered server which is located in London, but because most of my visitors are from the US (check out this cool infographic!), I always wanted to setup CDN to speed things up for them too. A CDN can offer tremendous WordPress performance improvements and by utilizing the W3 Total Cache plugin you optimize WordPress from it’s core.
Since there wasn’t any related documentation available, Dediserve was very kind to offer me a free first month on their CDN service to test things out.

What is a CDN

A CDN is a global network of caching servers and smart DNS routing that delivers your content and media to your users from the closest possible location. The result is the fastest possible load times, better Google rankings and less load on your servers!
When US visitors view my blog, images are served from the UK, making it a long way from the visitor to the server. By implementing a CDN, edge servers located all around the world serve those images from the nearest location to the visitor. Dediserve is running on the OnApp CDN engine, and has over 60 locations all around the world at the time of writing.
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Stress testing WordPress on a single node VPS

Lately I’ve been trying to find a cheap close-to-perfect-but-not-so-difficult-to-setup solution for my personal blog. A kind of “set and forget” thing if you will.
Until now, my blog was running on a Dell Dual-Xeon /w 2GB RAM cPanel server (along with a few other sites) and was working pretty smooth. Based on pingdom’s full page test my blog needed 6-7 seconds to fully load which is kind of acceptable considering the theme, the twitter/flickr integration on the sidebar and the needed dns queries to contact facebook, google analytics and woopra servers.

Last night bestvpscloud from the VPS.NET forums pointed out to this script that installs nginx, php5, mysql, exim4 and wordpress on low-end VPS servers, and after reading the comments I got to this guy’s blog who also suggested adding the dotdeb.org repository and upgrade to PHP 5.3.

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