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Redis cache for speeding up your WordPress site

A few weeks back, we wrote about how reducing MySQL queries and suggested that Redis was one available option for those who wanted to take their caching to the next level. Now, a quick tutorial on installing Redis and configuring WordPress to communicate with Redis as a caching layer.

Redis is an open-source data structure store, and it’s popular among WordPress users for its simplicity and highly optimized approach to caching, which can help pages load significantly faster.

Why caching? In a normal WordPress installation, when a user browses to the index page (index.php), the MySQL database is queried for the posts within the loop. This is usually pretty quick, but if you have multiple loops or many concurrent users, the sheer volume of database queries can become overwhelming for your VPS. A caching layer like Redis will query the database once and create a plain HTML file that it will serve instead of normal index.php file, which will boost page loads and dramatically cut back on database queries.

Prerequisites

  • A VPS running Ubuntu 16.04
  • A working WordPress installation.

Step 1. Installing Redis

Redis is available in the default package repositories for all our OS options, so installation is a breeze.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/redis-server
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install redis-server php-redis

Now, we’ll quickly verify that Redis was installed correctly by running redis-cli. If you see the prompt change to 127.0.0.1:6379>, you’re off to a good start, and if you run the ping command, you should see PONG in response.

$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> ping
PONG

Step 2. Configuring Redis

Next, we need to set up a few configurations to make PHP and Redis work together, and for Redis to work as a cache. Open the /etc/redis/redis.conf file in the editor of your choosing, and add the following lines to the end of the file.

maxmemory 256mb
maxmemory-policy allkeys-lru

The RAM allotted in the maxmemory 256mb line can be increased according to your needs.

Finally, we’ll restart the Redis server.

$ sudo service redis-server restart

Step 3. Connecting WordPress to Redis

The easiest way to connect WordPress to Redis is by using a popular plugin called Redis Object Cache. Simply install the plugin via the WordPress dashboard and then navigate to the settings. You should see a screen like the following.

Enabling the cache

The plugin immediately recognizes our Redis installation, and all you have to do is click the Enable Object Cache button to start using Redis as a caching layer for WordPress.

Step 4. Double-check that the cache is working

Before we move on, let’s take a moment to ensure that Redis is actually being used as a caching layer for WordPress. Type in the following command, which will enable a real-time log of Redis activity.

$ redis-cli monitor

If the cache is working properly, you’ll start to see output like the following:

1501199997.504554 [0 127.0.0.1:58530] "PING"
1501199997.505818 [0 127.0.0.1:58530] "GET" "wp_:default:is_blog_installed"
1501199997.509033 [0 127.0.0.1:58530] "GET" "wp_:options:notoptions"
1501199997.509179 [0 127.0.0.1:58530] "GET" "wp_:options:alloptions"

Hit Ctrl + c to end output.

And with that, your WordPress implementation should be cached and ready to serve pages faster than ever before! Proof that not every speed boost needs to come with incredibly complex administration—there’s a good reason why so many people love and use Redis on their VPS.

What is RAID 10? (and how does it help your VPS?)

You’ve probably seen it on the homepage of your favourite hosting company…

Featuring RAID 10 storage!

So it must be pretty important…right?

I mean, they use an exclamation point and everything!

But if you don’t have a ton of experience in server configurations, you’re probably wondering what exactly it is…and why it should matter to you.

Well, we’ll tell you:

What is RAID 10?

The redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is a way to store data across multiple hard drives in order to offer better speed or redundancy, or both. RAID 10 combines both disk mirroring (RAID 1) and disk striping (RAID 0) configurations to keep your data safer.

Why is RAID 10 important?

At SSD Nodes, we use a RAID 10 (or RAID 1+0) configuration on all of our VPS because it keeps our cloud servers humming along. The setup “offers both tremendous speed and maximum file redundancy,” which is a critical aspect of a high-performing SSD-based hosting experience.

But for those who aren’t experienced in the nuances of server hardware configurations, it’s yet another piece of jargon that’s difficult to parse—is it a real benefit, or does it just sound good?

With transparency in mind, we thought we’d take a moment to dig into what RAID 10 means to us, and why it’s so important to your hosting experience.

The Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID)

At its core, the redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is a way to store data across multiple hard drives in order to offer better speed or redundancy, or both. While your desktop computer probably doesn’t use a RAID, and your laptop certainly doesn’t, it’s used quite universally inside of web servers and data centres.

RAID 0 splits, or stripes, data evenly across two or more disk for the sake of performance. It could be said it’s similar to two people, each armed with a shovel, sharing the work of digging a hole, rather than one person with a really large shovel. Striping a large number of disks together creates big performance boosts, but if something does wrong with one of the disks, all the data, across every drive, is corrupted.

RAID 1 involves creating a mirror of a disk’s data onto one or more other disks. The same data is mirrored across all the different drives and is limited to the smallest disk in the array. This creates great redundancy but offers little benefits in the way of speed.

RAID 10 is also known as RAID 1+0, in that it combines disk mirroring and disk striping. In a RAID of four disks, there are two pairs in a RAID 1, and then those pairs are placed into a RAID 0. An illustration is often best:

A diagram of the basic RAID 10 configuration. Image courtesy of Wikipedia editor NudelSuppe.

The pros of RAID 10

By combining the performance enhancements of RAID 0 with the hardware-level mirroring protection of RAID 1, RAID 10 offers both speed and resilience.

When you write data to your server, it can be written to multiple disks simultaneously, which improves the overall speed. Same goes for reading that same data, which makes it a great solution for applications that are heavy on I/O. RAID 10 is just one of the many ways we’ve managed to churn out more than 1GB/s of I/O on our platform.

This doesn’t really concern you, as a user of our platform, but RAID 10 is also a wonderful option in case something does go wrong with one of the disks. Restoring data is quick and relatively painless compared to other RAID options.

The cons of RAID 10

One of the major disadvantages of a RAID 10 configuration is that only 50 percent of a given drive is usable because of the mirroring effects.

RAID 10 != built-in backups

Some people incorrectly believe that a RAID setup with mirroring is equivalent to having a backup.

It’s true that the drives are mirrored copies if one drive becomes corrupted, it’s very easy for the other’s data to become unreadable as well. This applies to any RAID, whether it’s inside your local computer or in a data centre, and it applies to your VPS as well.

But RAID 10 doesn’t protect you from hackers, viruses, database corruptions, or user error.

Simply put, there’s no replacement for an effective backup solution that protects the critical data you keep on your VPS.

Read how to simplify your VPS backup strategy.

In reality, the pros and cons of RAID 10 are rather invisible to the end-user. In an ideal situation, you’ll never have to experience the benefits of RAID 10’s mirroring in the event of disk failure. And the performance is built-in, so you’re ready to move fast from the first day. Even then, it’s important to know what makes your server move.

Need some ideas about what you can do with all that performance? Let us know how you’re taking advantage of the RAID 10-powered performance.

How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack On CentOS 7

Introduction

A “LAMP” stack is a group of open source software that is typically installed together to enable a server to host dynamic websites and web apps. This term is actually an acronym which represents the Linux operating system, with the Apache web server. The site data is stored in a MySQL database (using MariaDB), and dynamic content is processed by PHP.

In this guide, we’ll get a LAMP stack installed on an CentOS 7 VPS. CentOS will fulfill our first requirement: a Linux operating system.

Note: The LAMP stack can be installed automatically on your Droplet by adding this script to its User Data when launching it. Check out this tutorial to learn more about Droplet User Data.

Prerequisites

Before you begin with this guide, you should have a separate, non-root user account set up on your server.

Step One — Install Apache

The Apache web server is currently the most popular web server in the world, which makes it a great default choice for hosting a website.

We can install Apache easily using CentOS’s package manager, yum. A package manager allows us to install most software pain-free from a repository maintained by CentOS.

For our purposes, we can get started by typing these commands:

sudo yum install httpd

Since we are using a sudo command, these operations get executed with root privileges. It will ask you for your regular user’s password to verify your intentions.

Afterwards, your web server is installed.

Once it installs, you can start Apache on your VPS:

sudo systemctl start httpd.service

You can do a spot check right away to verify that everything went as planned by visiting your server’s public IP address in your web browser (see the note under the next heading to find out what your public IP address is if you do not have this information already):

http://your_server_IP_address/

You will see the default CentOS 7 Apache web page, which is there for informational and testing purposes. It should look something like this:

CentOS 7 Apache default

If you see this page, then your web server is now correctly installed.

The last thing you will want to do is enable Apache to start on boot. Use the following command to do so:

sudo systemctl enable httpd.service

How To Find your Server’s Public IP Address

If you do not know what your server’s public IP address is, there are a number of ways you can find it. Usually, this is the address you use to connect to your server through SSH.

From the command line, you can find this a few ways. First, you can use the iproute2 tools to get your address by typing this:

ip addr show eth0 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2; }' | sed 's/\/.*$//'

This will give you one or two lines back. They are both correct addresses, but your computer may only be able to use one of them, so feel free to try each one.

An alternative method is to use an outside party to tell you how it sees your server. You can do this by asking a specific server what your IP address is:

curl http://icanhazip.com

Regardless of the method you use to get your IP address, you can type it into your web browser’s address bar to get to your server.

Step Two — Install MySQL (MariaDB)

Now that we have our web server up and running, it is time to install MariaDB, a MySQL drop-in replacement. MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL relational database management system. Basically, it will organize and provide access to databases where our site can store information.

Again, we can use yum to acquire and install our software. This time, we’ll also install some other “helper” packages that will assist us in getting our components to communicate with each other:

sudo yum install mariadb-server mariadb

When the installation is complete, we need to start MariaDB with the following command:

sudo systemctl start mariadb

Now that our MySQL database is running, we want to run a simple security script that will remove some dangerous defaults and lock down access to our database system a little bit. Start the interactive script by running:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

The prompt will ask you for your current root password. Since you just installed MySQL, you most likely won’t have one, so leave it blank by pressing enter. Then the prompt will ask you if you want to set a root password. Go ahead and enter Y, and follow the instructions:

Enter current password for root (enter for none):
OK, successfully used password, moving on...

Setting the root password ensures that nobody can log into the MariaDB
root user without the proper authorization.

New password: password
Re-enter new password: password
Password updated successfully!
Reloading privilege tables..
 ... Success!

For the rest of the questions, you should simply hit the “ENTER” key through each prompt to accept the default values. This will remove some sample users and databases, disable remote root logins, and load these new rules so that MySQL immediately respects the changes we have made.

The last thing you will want to do is enable MariaDB to start on boot. Use the following command to do so:

sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service

At this point, your database system is now set up and we can move on.

Step Three — Install PHP

PHP is the component of our setup that will process code to display dynamic content. It can run scripts, connect to our MySQL databases to get information, and hand the processed content over to our web server to display.

We can once again leverage the yum system to install our components. We’re going to include the php-mysql package as well:

sudo yum install php php-mysql

This should install PHP without any problems. We need to restart the Apache web server in order for it to work with PHP. You can do this by typing this:

sudo systemctl restart httpd.service

Install PHP Modules

To enhance the functionality of PHP, we can optionally install some additional modules.

To see the available options for PHP modules and libraries, you can type this into your system:

yum search php-

The results are all optional components that you can install. It will give you a short description for each:

php-bcmath.x86_64 : A module for PHP applications for using the bcmath library
php-cli.x86_64 : Command-line interface for PHP
php-common.x86_64 : Common files for PHP
php-dba.x86_64 : A database abstraction layer module for PHP applications
php-devel.x86_64 : Files needed for building PHP extensions
php-embedded.x86_64 : PHP library for embedding in applications
php-enchant.x86_64 : Enchant spelling extension for PHP applications
php-fpm.x86_64 : PHP FastCGI Process Manager
php-gd.x86_64 : A module for PHP applications for using the gd graphics library
. . .

To get more information about what each module does, you can either search the internet, or you can look at the long description in the package by typing:

yum info package_name

There will be a lot of output, with one field called Description which will have a longer explanation of the functionality that the module provides.

For example, to find out what the php-fpm module does, we could type this:

yum info php-fpm

Along with a large amount of other information, you’ll find something that looks like this:

. . .
Summary     : PHP FastCGI Process Manager
URL         : http://www.php.net/
License     : PHP and Zend and BSD
Description : PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI
            : implementation with some additional features useful for sites of
            : any size, especially busier sites.

If, after researching, you decide you would like to install a package, you can do so by using the yum install command like we have been doing for our other software.

If we decided that php-fpm is something that we need, we could type:

sudo yum install php-fpm

If you want to install more than one module, you can do that by listing each one, separated by a space, following the yum install command, like this:

sudo yum install package1 package2 ...

At this point, your LAMP stack is installed and configured. We should still test out our PHP though.

Step Four — Test PHP Processing on your Web Server

In order to test that our system is configured properly for PHP, we can create a very basic PHP script.

We will call this script info.php. In order for Apache to find the file and serve it correctly, it must be saved to a very specific directory, which is called the “web root”.

In CentOS 7, this directory is located at /var/www/html/. We can create the file at that location by typing:

sudo vi /var/www/html/info.php

This will open a blank file. We want to put the following text, which is valid PHP code, inside the file:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

When you are finished, save and close the file.

If you are running a firewall, run the following commands to allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http 
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Now we can test whether our web server can correctly display content generated by a PHP script. To try this out, we just have to visit this page in our web browser. You’ll need your server’s public IP address again.

The address you want to visit will be:

http://your_server_IP_address/info.php

The page that you come to should look something like this:

CentOS 7 default PHP info

This page basically gives you information about your server from the perspective of PHP. It is useful for debugging and to ensure that your settings are being applied correctly.

If this was successful, then your PHP is working as expected.

You probably want to remove this file after this test because it could actually give information about your server to unauthorized users. To do this, you can type this:

sudo rm /var/www/html/info.php

You can always recreate this page if you need to access the information again later.

Conclusion

Now that you have a LAMP stack installed, you have many choices for what to do next. Basically, you’ve installed a platform that will allow you to install most kinds of websites and web software on your server.

How To Install WordPress on CentOS 7

Introduction

WordPress is a free and open source website and blogging tool that uses PHP and MySQL. WordPress is currently the most popular CMS (Content Management System) on the Internet and has over 20,000 plugins to extend its functionality. This makes WordPress a great choice for getting a website up and running quickly and easily.

In this guide, we will demonstrate how to get a WordPress instance set up with an Apache web server on CentOS 7.

Prerequisites

Before you begin with this guide, there are a few steps that need to be completed first.

You will need a CentOS 7 server installed and configured with a non-root user that has sudoprivileges.

Additionally, you’ll need to have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack installed on your CentOS 7 server. If you don’t have these components already installed or configured, you can use this guide to learn how to install LAMP on CentOS 7.

When you are finished with these steps, you can continue with the installation of WordPress.

Step One — Create a MySQL Database and User for WordPress

The first step that we will take is in preparation. WordPress uses a relational database to manage information for the site and its users. We have MariaDB (a fork of MySQL) installed already, which can provide this functionality, but we need to make a database and a user for WordPress to work with.

To get started, log into MySQL’s root (administrative) account by issuing this command:

mysql -u root -p

You will be prompted for the password that you set for the root account when you installed MySQL. Once that password is submitted, you will be given a MySQL command prompt.

First, we’ll create a new database that WordPress can control. You can call this whatever you would like, but I will be calling it wordpress for this example.

CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

Note: Every MySQL statement or command must end in a semi-colon (;), so check to make sure that this is present if you are running into any issues.

Next, we are going to create a new MySQL user account that we will use exclusively to operate on WordPress’s new database. Creating one-function databases and accounts is a good idea, as it allows for better control of permissions and other security needs.

I am going to call the new account wordpressuser and will assign it a password of password. You should definitely use a different username and password, as these examples are not very secure.

CREATE USER wordpressuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

At this point, you have a database and user account that are each specifically made for WordPress. However, the user has no access to the database. We need to link the two components together by granting our user access to the database.

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO wordpressuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Now that the user has access to the database, we need to flush the privileges so that MySQL knows about the recent privilege changes that we’ve made:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Once these commands have all been executed, we can exit out of the MySQL command prompt by typing:

exit

You should now be back to your regular SSH command prompt.

Step Two — Install WordPress

Before we download WordPress, there is one PHP module that we need to install to ensure that it works properly. Without this module, WordPress will not be able to resize images to create thumbnails. We can get that package directly from CentOS’s default repositories using yum:

sudo yum install php-gd

Now we need to restart Apache so that it recognizes the new module:

sudo service httpd restart

We are now ready to download and install WordPress from the project’s website. Luckily, the WordPress team always links the most recent stable version of their software to the same URL, so we can get the most up-to-date version of WordPress by typing this:

cd ~
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

This will download a compressed archive file that contains all of the WordPress files that we need. We can extract the archived files to rebuild the WordPress directory with tar:

tar xzvf latest.tar.gz

You will now have a directory called wordpress in your home directory. We can finish the installation by transferring the unpacked files to Apache’s document root, where it can be served to visitors of our website. We can transfer our WordPress files there with rsync, which will preserve the files’ default permissions:

sudo rsync -avP ~/wordpress/ /var/www/html/

rysnc will safely copy all of the contents from the directory you unpacked to the document root at /var/www/html/. However, we still need to add a folder for WordPress to store uploaded files. We can do that with the mkdir command:

mkdir /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads

Now we need to assign the correct ownership and permissions to our WordPress files and folders. This will increase security while still allowing WordPress to function as intended. To do this, we’ll use chown to grant ownership to Apache’s user and group:

sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/*

With this change, the web server will be able to create and modify WordPress files, and will also allow us to upload content to the server.

Step Three — Configure WordPress

Most of the configuration required to use WordPress will be completed through a web interface later on. However, we need to do some work from the command line to ensure that WordPress can connect to the MySQL database that we created for it.

Begin by moving into the Apache root directory where you installed WordPress:

cd /var/www/html

The main configuration file that WordPress relies on is called wp-config.php. A sample configuration file that mostly matches the settings we need is included by default. All we have to do is copy it to the default configuration file location, so that WordPress can recognize and use the file:

cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

Now that we have a configuration file to work with, let’s open it in a text editor:

nano wp-config.php

The only modifications we need to make to this file are to the parameters that hold our database information. We will need to find the section titled MySQL settings and change the DB_NAMEDB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD variables in order for WordPress to correctly connect and authenticate to the database that we created.

Fill in the values of these parameters with the information for the database that you created. It should look like this:

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'wordpressuser');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password');

These are the only values that you need to change, so save and close the file when you are finished.

Step Four — Complete Installation Through the Web Interface

Now that you have your files in place and your software is configured, you can complete the WordPress installation through the web interface. In your web browser, navigate to your server’s domain name or public IP address:

http://server_domain_name_or_IP

First, you will need to select the language that you would like to install WordPress with. After selecting a language and clicking on Continue, you will be presented with the WordPress initial configuration page, where you will create an initial administrator account:

WordPress Web Install

Fill out the information for the site and administrative account that you wish to make. When you are finished, click on the Install WordPress button at the bottom to continue.

WordPress will confirm the installation, and then ask you to log in with the account that you just created:

WordPress Success

To continue, hit the Log in button at the bottom, then fill out your administrator account information:

WordPress Login

After hitting Log in, you will be presented with your new WordPress dashboard:

WordPress Dashboard

How to Choose Between SSD and HDD VPS Hosting

Modern-day businesses are beginning to realize the importance of agile hosting services. It has become evident that the quality of hosting will determine the success of several crucial parameters such as SEO, bounce rate reduction, customer retention, and to an extent even the sales numbers. Given the relevance of these factors in determining the success of any business, companies have begun to look for faster and better hosting services.

Gone are the days when companies would rely solely on the options provided by their website developers. Today, companies research the best possible solutions and evaluate what may be ideal for them. While most organisations have already made the move from Shared to VPS Hosting, smart organizations are diving further to determine the benefits between SSD vs HDD VPS Hosting. Let us try to find out what is the difference between Solid-State Drive and Hard Disk Drive along with your best possible option.

Mechanism
Before we take a look at the difference between SSD and HDD, it is vital to understand the underlying working mechanism of both technologies. HDD is a decades-old technology based on the mechanism of vinyl records. The HDD drive stores data in patterns magnetically. It has a thin metal disk which rotates at 7200 RPM to record and read data. Each driver is equipped with sensors capable of reading the data and sending it back to the motherboard.

The problem, however, arises with the fact that the disk will approximately spin 3.8 billion times a year leading to wear & tear and eventually some mechanical failure. On the other hand, SDD does not contain any moving parts. It stores data on interconnected flash memory chips. It can be seen as an upsized and advanced version of the regular pen drives. SSD uses a NAND-based flash memory making it more secure even when the device is turned off.

Speed
The working mechanism plays a significant role in dictating the outcome of SSD vs HDD Speed tests. HDD is equipped with moving parts bringing lesser read speeds and write speed as compared to SSD. SSD with its NAND flash memory is capable of clocking substantially high read and write speeds. The rotational latency in HDD leads to lower speeds when compared to SSD.

It is obvious that hosting servers employing SSD will offer better speeds than service providers using HDD storage. A faster loading website will give a significant boost to your SEO and improve your Google ranking. Search engine algorithms give importance to the website loading time in determining the rankings. Google and other search engines rewards websites with faster loading times as it provides better customer experience.

A faster loading website also gives a better customer experience as they can navigate without any lag and waiting time. Also, with the attention span of viewers reducing with ever increasing internet speeds, you have a narrow window to attract a customer before they decide to switch to another website. Web hosting with SSD ensures that your customer is delighted to visit your site and use your product or services.

Data Security
Data security is another crucial parameter that can severely affect your organization. The hosting servers are operational 24*7 which is different from the production environment. Overloading of hardware with I/O requests can lead to the failure of the hard disk. Such a failure could cause your website to go offline and raise uncertainty over the recovery of your data. While most data centres do keep a backup of the data, but there is always a possibility that you may lose some due to unforeseen circumstances. It is worth noting that the cost of data recovery with HDD is higher than that for SSD.

SSD comes with faster processing time reducing the risk of failure due to increased I/O requests. These also do not have any mechanical parts that could undergo wear & tear over a period of time and lead to mechanical failure. So, your data is extremely secure with SSD VPS hosting.

Environmental Factors
The usage of SSD drives in data centres results in lower power consumption when compared with the power consumed by the HDD drives. This is because the latter generates heat due to the mechanical moving parts and needs more energy to cool down. SSD drive, on the contrary, does not generate any such heat during its operation. Besides saving the environment, opting for SSD VPS hosting will also save your financial resources as the plans are comparatively cheaper.

Conclusion
The aforementioned benefits clearly indicate that hosting your website with SSD based VPS Hosting will have long-term benefits for your company. Although, it is essential for you to evaluate the needs of your organisation before switching to SSD VPS hosting. If you have an HTML based static site, you may not see substantial benefits. However, if your company has a high-performance website with heavy daily traffic, you will definitely benefit from SSD VPS Hosting.

It is worth noting that the prices of SSD drives have come down significantly in the past few years. These have ensured that many notable hosting service providers have switched to SSD storage. At Resellerclub, all our VPS Hosting plans from Standard to Elite come with SSD storage options. The SSD VPS Hosting plans offered by us provide storage space from 20-120 GB and an average OS boot time of 8-12 seconds.

SSD enables backup in about 6 hours, data access in 20 ms, spare up to 6% of CPU power and are less likely to fail. Unless the efforts required to switch out-weigh these benefits, you should switch to SSD Hosting. For any further assistance and to know more about the switching process, you can get in touch with our 24*7 support centre.

SSD VPS Hosting and Its Benefit for your Business Website

VPS Hosting or Virtual Private Server Hosting is one of the preferred hosting options for several small-medium sized online businesses. The reason being, it is a bridge between Shared and Dedicated Hosting, offering its users the best of both worlds. If you are new and want to know more about VPS Hosting, you can read more about it. However, we assume, you all know what is VPS Hosting, and will move on to understanding the finer nuances of it, namely the kind of storage device that VPS follows.

Storage devices are categorised into two types – HDD and SSD. HDD stands for Hard Disk Drive whereas, SSD stands for Solid State Drive. In this article, we’ll cover the new and advanced form of storage – SSD and how it integrates with VPS Hosting. So, first things first!

What is SSD VPS Hosting?
SSD VPS Hosting, in simple words, can be defined as a ‘Solid State Drive VPS Hosting Plan’. Here the VPS Hosting service provider uses an SSD disk instead of the traditional Hard Disk Drive on their physical servers. The benefit of an SSD over HDD is that it consumes less power and delivers faster performance and speed. Let us see in detail, what distinguishes the two drives from one another.

Comparison between SSD and HDD

SSDHDD
SSD or Solid State Drives draw less power and thus, boosting battery life.HDD or Hard Disk Drives draw a lot of power thus affecting their battery.
SSD uses flash memory to store data. Hence data doesn’t get deleted suddenly due to the magnetic disk effect on data.HDD has circular platters to store data in magnetic format. However, a downside to magnetic disk storage is that magnets can erase data, hence data is vulnerable.
SSDs have hardly any moving parts. Hence they produce very little noise and vibrations.HDDs have platters to store data, and they cause noise while moving, as well as, vibrations.
Cost wise SSDs are expensive, but they deliver high performance to the website running.HDDs are cheaper as compared to SSD, but they compromise on the performance of the website in the longer run.

3 Major Advantages of SSD VPS Hosting:

  1. SSD uses flash memory to store data. This improves the read-write speed significantly, leading to improved performance of the server, as well as, the website loading speed.
  2. HDDs are more prone to damage as they use movable platters instead of flash memory. Thus, SSD’s are more reliable in terms of efficiency and durability which, in turn, builds trust and credibility for your customer.
  3. A faster loading website directly impacts Google search engine results and your website’s SEO. Websites hosted with SSD VPS Hosting load faster, thus helping you enhance your page ranking.

We at ResellerClub, provide all our VPS Hosting plans with SSD storage options, along with, storage space from 20-120 GB. Furthermore, with our SSD VPS Hosting you get to choose your choice of control panel either cPanel or Plesk.

Choosing the right storage option for your VPS Hosting depends on your needs. In the end, it is your marketing strategy, good content, and how you present your website to a potential customer that makes the difference, however, the right hosting plan just acts as a bonus! So decide wisely!

How to Choose the Best Caching Solution for Your Website

Consider this: you’ve set up your website and you finally have customers. However, the wait is long, and the website is slow to load. By the time it loads, you’ve lost your opportunity to convert a visitor to a paying customer – leading to a loss of revenue. In a matter of seconds, they’ve moved on.

Why?

Studies have shown that nearly half of the customers expect page load times of about three seconds. By recognizing this problem early enough, you can take steps to prevent this from happening. How? By implementing the right caching solution for your website.

What is Web Cache?

Caching refers to the process of storing data, temporarily, in a computing environment – namely a cache. When customers look at your web page, those files are automatically stored on the hard disk, in a cache subdirectory on their browser. When they return to look at that page, the browser can access those files from the cache, rather than returning to the original server to fetch the data again.

Without caching: When a customer visits your website, the browser will send a request to your server for site data, like content, media, code etc. The data is then sent to the customer’s browser. Each piece of this data needs to be loaded individually before it can be displayed. There are always delays while the transfer is happening and a lot of additional factors that can slow the process down. For e.g., if the visitor is located far away from your server, it can adversely affect your loading time.

With caching: The data is stored in a location close to your customer – it goes to where your customer is, cutting down on loading time. For example, web browser stores data at your customer’s end once the page is loaded for the first time. This reduces the page load speed by a mile for a returning user.

The advantages are clear. What you need to do is choose a caching solution that suits your website. There are many methods of caching available. We’re going to discuss three: server caching, browser caching and caching plugins and how each could impact your website.

Server caching: 
If your website is busy, dynamic, content heavy and experiences high volumes of traffic, you may want to look into server caching. One of the best cache servers is Varnish. This is how it works – when your customer visits your site, a series of requests are sent to the server to enable the page to load. The server then looks for the files pertaining to the request, execute any code related to that request and then return the web page to the user. By installing caching mechanisms like Varnish, it essentially acts as a middleman, between the user and the server and looks out for duplicate requests from before. The next time the customer visits your website, Varnish will respond by quickly sending a cached version of the result. This can increase the speed of your site exponentially. It also cuts down on how much processing power you need to respond to high volumes of traffic.

Browser caching: 
Whenever a browser loads a web page, it needs to download all the files to display the page properly – this includes HTML, CSS, images and JavaScript. If your website has a lot of files, you can face two issues – first, large files take longer to load (especially if your customers are using a slow internet connection). Secondly, each file makes a separate request to your server, which adds to the work your server needs to do. Browser caching will help by storing some of the files on your customer’s browser. The first time your customer visits your site, it may take time to load, but as they continue to interact with your website (either by refreshing, revisiting or even moving to another page on your site) files are being cached onto their browser. This cuts down on the data that your customer uses to load your site, and it saves bandwidth on your server.

Browser caching works by identifying elements of your website that can be saved offline. These elements are those that are not likely to be changed on a regular basis – like your logo for instance. To enable browser caching, you’ll need to edit your HTTP headers in order to set expiry times for certain files. If certain files are updated frequently, you can give them shorter expiry times.

Caching plugins: 
Currently, WordPress powers nearly 33 per cent of the web. If your website is one among this number, you can look at third-party caching plugins. These are simple and easy to install. The only catch is the sheer number of plugins available to you. However, some of these plugins are highly recommended, like W3 Total Cache, which offers to the cache via memory, disk or CDN (Content Delivery Network). It also removes unnecessary or redundant data on posts, pages, feeds, JavaScript and more. Thanks to this you can save on server bandwidth, which leads to increased server performance, reduced download time, and boosts conversion rates – all good news for you. You can also look at other popular plugins like WP Super Cache and WP- FFPC.

What are the benefits overall?

  1. Reduced network burden: Between your content and your customer, data can be cached at several points. For example with server caching, web pages are stored and served to your customer efficiently. When it is closer to the customer, requests will not place a burden on the network between the customer and your website – just the cache.
  2. Increased performance: When you choose caching as an option, it frees up resources on the original server to improve the overall performance.
  3. Ranking: Site speed is one of the most important factors when it comes to your website’s ranking. Faster websites are favoured by search engines (and aided by great SEO setting and good quality content). The slower your website, the lower you drop in the rankings.
  4. User Experience: You want your customers to have the best experience on your website. A faster website will help your customers browse better. What’s more, cached data saves on your user’s data (to a certain extent) due to the fact that static files are less of a load, as compared to dynamic requests.

At the end of the day, caching is an excellent solution to speed up your website. Our Cloud Hosting services make use of advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish to ensure that the server caching is taken care off. Choosing which caching solution suits your website will require careful consideration on your part – which parts need to be cached and which data on your website will change with time.

When is it time to make the switch to VPS hosting?

To reduce the cost of operation, most business websites tend to start off with web hosting that is cost effective and that would be Shared Hosting. However, Shared Hosting is also limited in many ways and there may come a time when you need to consider an upgrade.

Logically, the next step up would be the type of web host which offers additional benefits that can help higher-volume websites cope with increased traffic or other requirements. VPS hosting is usually the popular option when comparing the features and price.

Before I go into greater detail about this and the benefits of VPS hosting, let’s take a look at the limitations of Shared Hosting so that we can be clear about what the key differences are as compared to VPS hosting.

The Limitations of Shared Hosting

As mentioned, Shared Hosting is usually the first step into the game and is offered by almost every web hosting provider in existence. It is the simplest of plans and basically involves a web host cramming as many websites onto a single server as they think it can support.

All of those websites have access to the same features and share the same resources, from disk space to CPU power. Think of it like living in a communal hall where everyone lives in one huge room and shares a common kitchen, washroom and other facilities.

Because of the limited features that come with Shared Hosting plans, websites that grow larger may have difficulties remaining on these plans.

The question then would be – how do you know when it is time to move?

The main types of hosting plans are shared, VPS, Cloud and Dedicated hosting in order of power (and typically, cost). Although in some ways similar in nature, VPS hosting gives you dedicated resources on one server. Cloud hosting gives your virtual space on a network of servers. There is a limit to how much you can scale up your VPS plan, but with cloud, the sky is virtually the limit – at a price.

When to Move to VPS Hosting

After considering the benefits of VPS hosting as compared to other options, below are usually the general indicators which let you know that it is time to step up to VPS hosting.

  1. Your Website Traffic Increases Significantly
    We’ve all been there before – your new site has just been launched and you’re eagerly monitoring your hit rates to see if people are visiting. Over time, the handful of hits a day that you first saw begin to grow and before you know it, you’re seeing hundreds or thousands of visits per day. Each of your website visitors consumes resources and if your Shared Hosting account is using up too much of those, your web host may take action. From throttling your traffic to an outright suspension of your account, your traffic may come to an abrupt halt. Although web hosts typically have a few Shared Hosting plans you can scale up to, there is a limit and once you hit that cap the logical choice is to move on to VPS hosting for better benefits and at affordable price. Caption: One of the most distinctive differences between shared and VPS hosting is how resources are allocated (Img credit: WHSR – how does VPS hosting work)VPS hosting also has you sharing a server with others but in a dedicated environment. This means that you will be allocated server resources specifically for your site. You won’t have to share the server resources such as CPU, RAM or any data with others.
  2. You Want Greater Security
    There may be times when you are looking to increase the security of your website for the benefit of your users. If you are running an e-commerce site, this might be for various reasons such as processing or storing the personal or financial information of your users. Because VPS hosting accounts are siloed, the data you store and the process is much safer as compared to if you were to use Shared Hosting. VPS hosting also lets you install additional firewalls or lay down better security rules and restrictions.
  3. Seeking Better Reliability
    This again goes back to the nature of Shared Hosting versus VPS hosting. When something fails on your Shared Hosting account, typically all the sites that are being hosted on that server goes down. It’s like a really dangerous game of Russian Roulette. By its very nature, VPS hosting is typically more robust and the environments are configured in such a way that if there is a fault in your VPS account, the management software will usually reallocate your website to another instance and rebuilds it rapidly. The is one of the VPS hosting advantages you can get. There will be a slight downtime, but certainly not as bad as if your Shared Hosting account encounters a technical fault.
  4. You Need More Control
    Shared hosting accounts are usually quite limited in terms of what configuration changes you can make to the servers. Even if your web host allows the changes you need, you will normally have to contact technical support and request that the changes be made on your behalf. This can be frustrating at times and may feel overly restrictive. Take for example if you want to install some extra tools for your website. Shared hosting won’t allow this since you don’t normally have administrative access to the server. VPS hosting lets you have full administrative access/root access irrespective of what OS your account is based on. You can also request customized plans such as specific amounts of resources such as processor cores or memory. VPS hosting plans are typically scalable and in some instances, these resources can even be adjusted on the fly.
  5. If You Run an eCommerce Site
    If you are leaning towards running an online store or eCommerce site, there may be too many restrictions in Shared Hosting to meet your needs. VPS hosting offers more options that are better suited to hosting eCommerce sites simply because these sites are usually high volume and very demanding. With VPS Hosting you will also be better equipped to meet enhanced security needs that come along with accepting online payments. Serving up pages with multiple products lists are coping with increased queries to your database are also factors to be considered for eCommerce sites.

Conclusion

Most new users should be content with Shared Hosting and in fact, many of them will be content to stick with that for a long time. However, if you are serious about running your site it is very likely that your traffic will increase steadily.

Remember, migrating a website is just like moving house – it takes time and proper planning. Always ensure that you are a step ahead in the game and are prepared to move before performance issues force your hand.

Remember, if your site performance is suffering, your traffic volume will likely suffer as well. Users quickly get frustrated with erratic websites and there are many other sites they can switch over to if you aren’t at the top of your game.

If you are afraid of facing technical issues that you’re not sure you can cope with, there is always the option of looking for managed VPS hosting. UnifyHOST offers Linux VPS Hosting which gives you the technical support you needed. These plans may cost a bit more but offer you all the benefits of VPS hosting without the technical requirements needed to use them.

Managed vs Unmanaged VPS Hosting: Core Differences

Go back in time and think, what it was like when you first started your business website. Most likely, you were just making your way in the business world with little or no knowledge of what was to come next.

A business like everything starts small, and in time grows with the right marketing and nurturing. Not only does your business grow in its clientele and income but also, the incoming traffic to the website. And increased traffic is directly proportional to slower website speed. However, there is a catch, the former statement is only true if your business has outgrown the hosting plan.

Like most new businesses, chances are you too must have started with hosting your business on a Shared Hosting platform. But as your business evolves so do its need and with that comes the time to switch to a different type of hosting. Out of the several hosting options available, VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting is one of the most preferred options available. The reason being, it is the perfect mix of Shared and Dedicated Hosting environment. VPS Hosting can be categorized into two main types viz. Managed and Unmanaged VPS Hosting.

In this article, my aim is to help you understand what these two types of VPS Hosting (Managed vs Unmanaged VPS) include, their advantages, differences and which should you as a business owner choose. Let us begin!

What is Managed VPS Hosting?

Managing a server requires time, effort and technical expertise. In Managed VPS Hosting, your service provider takes care of all the server related responsibilities like core updates, maintenance, software installation etc. so you, the business owner can concentrate fully on growing your business. Managed VPS Hosting in simple words, is a hands-free approach.

If you are a new business owner with little or no technical experience, then Managed VPS Hosting is your go-to hosting solution, as you need not worry about anything server related.

What is Unmanaged VPS Hosting?

As the name suggests, unlike Managed VPS Hosting in Unmanaged VPS Hosting you, the business owner, have to take care of all the server responsibilities and maintenance tasks, whereas, your hosting provider only takes care of the physical server and its availability.

If you choose to opt for Unmanaged VPS Hosting then you should have the technical expertise or dedicated in-house resources managing your server, operating system and other server related resources. Even if you are technically sound, Unmanaged VPS Hosting is better suited if you are an established business as opposed to an emerging one, because the main focus is establishing your business in the market.

Advantages of VPS Hosting

Be it Managed VPS Hosting or UnManaged VPS Hosting, the benefits are the same. Let us have a quick look at some of the top benefits:

  1. Root Access:
    VPS Hosting is a bridge between Shared and Dedicated Hosting and as such it includes features of both. With VPS Hosting your server is isolated from other servers in spite of being hosted on the same physical server. Hence, you have complete root access to customize and manage your server and its resources.
  2. Instant Provisioning of Resources:
    Server resources like CPU, RAM, OS are provisioned instantly as soon as your server is up and running. These resources can also be scaled easily depending on your incoming traffic. However, note that the resources are scalable and not the hosting plan.
  3. Security:
    Since VPS Hosting is isolated like that of a Dedicated Hosting, it provides top-notch security to the website hosted on it. This is true even though all websites share the same physical server, as the IP addresses are dedicated to individual servers.
  4. Performance: 
    VPS Hosting comes with both SSD and HDD hard drive, however, most businesses these days opt for SSD VPS Hosting as its benefits outweigh that of HDD. SSD VPS Hosting improves the website loading speed which, in turn, improves the performance of the website, as well as, the Google search ranking.

Core Differences

There are not many differences between Managed vs Unmanaged VPS Hosting. Let us have a look at the two most crucial ones:

Managed VPS HostingUnmanaged VPS Hosting
Server maintenance and upgradation are taken care of by the hosting provider.Your hosting provider only takes care of maintaining the physical server and its guaranteed uptime.
Slightly expensive cost-wise but the best choice for beginners.Cheaper compared to Managed VPS Hosting but ideal for experienced users.

What Should You Choose?

By now I’m sure you’ve figured out which hosting is the most suited for your business website between Managed VPS and Unmanaged VPS Hosting if you plan to switch to VPS Hosting. And just like choosing the right hosting is important so is the choice of the hosting provider. A good hosting provider can make or break your website as no matter which hosting type you choose, the availability and uptime of your website depends on the availability of the main server.

We at UnifyHOST offer VPS Hosting with a maximum of 99.99% uptime, 24*7 support, top-notch infrastructure, DDoS protection, and much more so that you can relax and concentrate on running your business while we manage the technicalities.

With this, we come to an end and I hope you now have a fair understanding of Managed vs Unmanaged VPS Hosting and which to choose. If you have any more questions, feel free to leave them in the comments section below! Until next time.

Managing Web Host Manager (WHM) Packages: All You Need to Know

WHM, which stands for Web Host Manager, is a tool which service providers offer, and lease, to individual clients. The same hosting provider will also handle all the server related issues, leaving you, the client, free to look after your business and to look forward to its growth.

Now that we’ve covered the basic question of what web host manager is, let’s dive a bit deeper. To understand WHM, we’ve also got to look at cPanel. cPanel is a popular, Linux-based control panel for web hosting accounts. With cPanel, you can manage all your services through one single panel. Whether that refers to creating new FTP users and email ids, monitoring the utilization of resources, installing software or creating subdomains.

WHM offers administrative access to the backend of cPanel. It also allows you a lot of flexibility and control – whether you’re managing a few, resource-intense heavy sites, or a large number of smaller websites. With WHM, you get the option of selling hosting services to clients. Furthermore, you also get to create and manage multiple cPanels.

What can WHM offer you?

With WHM, you get a suite of tools, so that you easily carry out the following:

  1. Manage and monitor your sites
  2. Create custom hosting packages
  3. Delete, create or even suspend your cPanel accounts
  4. Access to look and change all of your DNS (Domain Name System) zones
  5. Permission to access server information and status to help with server management
  6. Create your own default page when you create a new account
  7. Brand and customize your hosting and control panel
  8. Change domain names and usernames
  9. Move between multiple cPanels in your account, and change anything that doesn’t need SQL access

There are two basic types of WHM. The basic WHM enables you to do all of the above. However, root WHM (also known as rWHM) has features which need root access to the servers, and as a result, you gain access to more tools.

Now, we’ve mentioned WHM and cPanel and explained the basics of both. They tend to be interchanged in people’s minds. However, there are differences between the two.

When you buy a web hosting package, you’re given a tool to manage your hosting service. Both cPanel and WHM help users manage and take charge of their web hosting. The key difference between cPanel and WHM is one we’ve mentioned earlier – WHM can have multiple cPanel accounts. However, it goes beyond that.

WHM is used primarily by a reseller to manage all the hosting accounts in each of their reseller plans. cPanel, on the other hand, is used by the customer to manage their own individual hosting accounts. While WHM provides root access to resellers, cPanel only provides access to the web hosting account to its users. The password details for your WHM and cPanel accounts are linked, that is, if you change your WHM password, your cPanel password will also change. cPanel enables its users to set the password. With WHM, you are restricted to adding domains, while cPanel makes it possible to remove add-ons and subdomains.

How to use WHM

If you are a web hosting reseller and provide web hosting as a service, then WHM will play a key role in the process. You, as a reseller, could use Web Host Manager to create a whole range of WHM packages that go from basic to advanced, to premium. The basic package might contain a smaller allocation of resources for disk space and bandwidth, while the premium packages are designed for far more resource heavy websites.

Once you’ve created a package with WHM, you can go ahead and create your account. Your new account will include:

  1. cPanel
  2. FTP account
  3. Website functionality
  4. SSH access (if it has been enabled in the packaged)

Creating a WHM package

If you’re looking to create a new package, here are the steps:

  1. Look for the Search box in the upper left hand of the screen, type package and then select Add Package once the option becomes visible
  2. You can type the name of the package (basic, premium etc.) in the package name text box
  3. Under Resources, you can set up quotas or limits based on the package you are designing
  4. Go to Settings and select the checkboxes for the resources you want to enable for that particular package
  5. Choose your cPanel theme after scrolling through the cPanel theme options (the default pattern is paper_lantern)
  6. For the feature list for the package, go to “Feature List” list box and select the options you want to use for the package. Alternatively, you can go with the default value.
  7. Select language locale from the Locale list box.
  8. The process ends when you click “Add”. WHM will then create the package

Editing the package:

  1. Type package into the Search box in the upper left hand of the WHM screen and click on the option “edit a package” when it is visible
  2. Choose which package you want to edit, hit the Edit option, and make the necessary changes
  3. If you make a mistake you can hit the reset
  4. If you make a mistake you can hit the Reset button and WHM will restore the package values to their last saved state
  5. Click Save changes, once you are done with your edits

Deleting a package

  1. Type package into the Search box in the upper left hand of the WHM screen and click on the option “delete a package” when it is visible
  2. Select the packages you want to remove and hit Delete – WHM will delete them immediately

WHM and Reseller Hosting

UnifyHOST hosting is considered to be one of the smoothest and easiest gateways for small to medium-sized businesses to join the web hosting business. WHM is the control panel that allows Resellers the opportunity to manage their hosting company. So, if you’re looking to venture into the world of Reseller Hosting, check out our different packages on our Reseller Hosting page. We also provide free WHM and cPanel with our reseller hosting packages.

By maintaining state of the art data centres and scalable servers, we provide quick solutions for your (or your customer’s) technical problems. We offer incredible and effective domain management through WHM and a sturdy infrastructure that can handle any network interface bottleneck.