The observant of you will have noticed that the site has sped up considerably over the last few days. This is because of a move to the wonderful VPS.net. Cloud hosting is the way of the future. A single hardware failure (like a hard disk) now cannot bring my site down. And I have better responsiveness than we were getting on a dedicated server which we were sharing with a few other sites.
WordPress is further sped up by using the W3 Total Cache plugin, which works wonders with something called APC. Thanks to the great tech support at VPS, and some great advice from Anthony Somerset, I was able to ask them to switch that on, set W3 Cache to use a disk cache for pages, and use the APC-enhanced caching mode for everything else. With javascripts and html “mimified”, GZip switched on, and eTags disabled the database just hums along! Of course I barely understand any of that but don’t have to thanks to the “managed support” who also moved across the domains and coped admirably with the minor teething problems inevitable.
Just for the real geeks like me out there, we have also enabled a few plugins that this new server can eat up, while the old one could not. The first is “Yet Another Related Posts” which serves the lists of links you will now see at the end of each post. Then there is a plugin simply called “Like” which serves the Facebook Like button, and “Tweetmeme” which gives us the Twitter button. I have also included the Zoe City daily top ten links in my sidebar, which all come from Christian websites.
Anybody with any further suggestions for me to futher improve or tweak the site, let me know. Also, if you are in the market for a new server host, then VPS.net is definitely worth a look.
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