OK, a few weeks back I blogged here that I’d moved my sites to a SliceHost account, installed the OS from scratch (Ubuntu Hardy), installed NGinx as the webserver etc.
I’ve been fairly busy coding and haven’t updated here and I wanted to take the opportunity to both thank and recommend a service that certainly made it painless for me and seems to be going from excellent and moving beyond.
First up. Some stat’s.
Performance Summary Report |
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The above score is for all sites, given they all run off of a WordPress MU installation (source is a once a month emailed report that is sent to me automatically from WebCEO.com who monitor the site). The difference between the figures above and all previous hosting arrangments is significant. Previous hosting (both shared, VPS and Dedicated) ranked 3-4 out of 10, whereas you can see above the score is now 7/10. The DNS lookup in particular is excellent. Connect time is great, hosting ping and download time could be improved on (I’m working on that), but reasonable given it all comes of off one single (though dedicated) MySQL database. A pure HTML site would probably score higher and I’m pretty sure the site detects the tool WebCEO uses to test as a bot, and so never serves cached pages to it – which means the human site visitor will often experience faster load time.
Note – the site uses no control panel. So there’s no behemoth idling away the CPU cycles and pinging the database server, just WordPress and the SMTP server (POP email is hosted using GoogleApps, which is working out extremely well so far).
Some of the things I’m looking to do is run the WordPress MU “sites” on their own databases (mutli-database), which takes a bit of fiddling. If the Aussie dollar returns to sane levels (it dipped this last two weeks by 10 cents and is fluctuating like a compass that can’t find North) I may host those databases on a separate slice.
The recommendation I want to make? The VPS Bible. (note – not a “paid or affiliate link”). For those who are not afraid of the command line there’s step by step tutorials that can’t be beaten. Those are my recommendation. For those feeling less adventurous (and believe me you’re missing out if you don’t at least have a play at setting up the good old manual way) he’s produced the first two of a series of automated scripts that, apart from a few edits to variables, will set the whole shebang up for you (only just added last week).
If you’re looking to setup a lean, mean, website on a VPS and don’t want the resource pain of what is otherwise a superfluous control panel then get over to the VPS Bible for the best $15 investment you’ll make this year. Tell “The_Guv” Scott sent you.
Next post I’m going to discuss how all this has affected SEO – and why micro ISV’s should care (hint – Google’s telling Pork Pies on server response speed vs SEO and Matt Cutts has admitted it).
Scott Kane
“May as well be here we are as where we are.”
-Australian Aboriginal saying
Scott, you are a very lovely man .. and clearly sensible
Thank you, Sir.
(PS .. LOL, I noticed your date is tomorrow, my time .. you are half a world ahead of me.)
Hi Guv!
Thanks for commenting. You’re welcome!
With respect to the date. It has it’s disadvantages. For example – if they announce the world is ending tomorrow in the Northern Hemishpere we never receive the warning…
Thanks for the reference to the VPSBible. I've just subscribed. What an invaluable resource!
I'm also a great fan of unmanged VPS.
Hi Craig!
Sorry for not replying earlier, so much going on! Fantastic that you subscribed, it is a great resource. Best with your VPS journey, very interested in hearing how you progress with it!
After taking your advice and subscribing to VPSBible I was able to get set up quickly – except I went with Linode instead of slicehost, since that's what the tutorials use. I hadn't touched a linux command line in almost 10 years. Despite that, it was fairly painless.
In the last two weeks I used Firebug + PageSpeed and YSlow to identify all the speed bottlenecks. It has definitely made an SEO difference. I've seen a bump in search traffic in what is otherwise a slower time of year for me. Cheers!
Hi Nick!
Thanks for letting me know about your results. Fantastic!!
I've been surprised at the SEO difference as well and as it's down to server response times (independent sources and stat's seem to confirm that) I suspect it's a crucial move.
I also "tips me lid" to the Gov. A powerful resource.
Great Scott!!
I had no idea you'd started a vpsB fan club downasunder. .. I promise, I won't laught at the Aussie rules football team ever again.
Ruddy top-notch. Scott, you are without a doubt my favorite politician
Actually it's amazing, I seem to have quite a few folks over your side of the planet. What a decent lot.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to meet you, Craig.
And to you, Nicholas, I'm really chuffed to hear things are looking good. It's very interesting to hear what you say about SEO. It is true that Google evaluate pageload times within their mystery x algorithm.
.. which makes me think I need to benchmark some caching tools .. damn, more to do.
One thing Scott, I see you're using WP (and disclosing the version, ahem) .. if you've not already, you may like to try the SEO plugin Headspace2 – by perhaps my fave plugin devver John Godley. takes a bit of work to set up but, for SEO, it knocks spots off anything else. Really worth it to get those H1's, page descriptions and so on set up right. Very clever piece of kit.
..er, WP3 came out a few hours ago, BTW .. upgraded some site or other and it still seems to be there ..
Hi Guv!
Sadly Headspace 2 (also one of my favorites) is broken with WP 3. Normally I do remove this manually. I’ve been remiss.
Would not use wordpress 4 any websites. U can tell a wordpress website by the font. They look like crap.
Esperanza I’ve heard this argument before. I’ve also seen it crumble over and over. Fonts are set by the designer of the site/template author. You are visiting WordPress based sites daily, without evening realizing it some of the time. But you’re entitled to your view and I’d be interested in hearing about your alternative CMS.
What about a control panel? I am looking for exactly what you write about here but I need to do it with a control panel. Options?
I did a backtrack on this site and it’s not running on Slicehost? Care to explain?
Hi squittexize – thanks for commenting, and the investigative journalism there…
OK. The site was running on Slicehost. I’ve moved it to a Linode for now. I’m doing a comparison between the two. Will expand soon in another post.
Yes and with a all this YOU become responsible for security. YOU become responsible when it all crashes around YOUR ears. YOU are responsible for backups and upgrades and all the stuff YOU know nothing about. My advice to YOU is stick to a web host who does all this for you. I use [URL Automatically Removed From Post]
This is fantastic, I’ve been wanting to do this but have been scared off from the configuration being a linux noob. Thanks for the links, just what I needed to give me a shove. Is Slicehost the better option?
HI Fiona,
Thanks for commenting, glad it’s of help to you.
Slicehost is one good option. I’m currently test driving Linode to compare. So far I’m finding it to be a faster network than the Slicehost one and am sorely tempted to switch over. The RAM allocation is more generous than the Slicehost one too. Discussions around the web seem to recommend the two, so pick the one that seems to fit your purposes is probably the safest and fairest advice.
Terrific work! This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher!
Er – for most keyword searches pertinent to the article it’s ranked as either #1 or #2, Jackie. I can’t for the life of me think how it could be ranked any higher.
I really liked this article, this one goes right into my stumbleupon webpage
I’m pretty sure I remember Google has said many times speed is not a factor in ranking.
Hi Adrian,
Thanks for commenting. Yes, Google has said that, right up until recently. This seems to have changed, Matt Cutts has given strong indications it is now a part of their ranking algorithm and it appears to be a major factor in what I’ve seen with my own domains. Given that nothing of any magnitude has changed except server speed. Beyond that I’ve been doing nothing much different from what I normally do, yet mutliple sites began ranking higher some three months back, and a burst recently pushing them higher again.
VPS? Been there, got the teeshirt, waste of time and effort. Honestly it’s impossible to do the things you write about here AND HAVE A LIFE! Nobody can do it. That’s why they have such things as Webhosts. Can you spell Webhost? No? Didn’t think so. Dont waste your time dudes. Nothing to see here. Move along. I use GoDaddy. Never looked back. Never will. See my site [URL Automatically Removed From Post] and you can have a life too!!!!!
Hi Roland,
Thanks for commenting and the amusing rhetoric. Sorry about your affiliate link there, seems to have been removed, can’t think how?
Interesting read but I’m yet to be convinced about the SEO aspect. Sounds like to much work. At the end of the day software submission is free and effective for SEO. I hope you’ll use this tip coming from an old hand in the industry. Being doing this five years now.
Rolsoft,
Please do a search on this blog, rather than me reiterating here, for “download sites”. There is virtually zero value in submitting to them beyond the longer term players like Download.com. Read the articles, most of them are backed up with examples and instances where download sites caused more problems than any value delivered.
I don’t want to rain on your parade on the “old hand” issue but five years in this industry is a little short of the three decades I’ve enjoyed. Be open to thinking outside the box, it’ll make the next five years more worthwhile.