Virtual Private Servers: Tips for Optimisation

Virtual Private servers play an important key role in the success of your online business, while your business grows and changes. It is always a good idea to look for potential ways to optimise the performance of your virtual private server, even if it is running smoothly. Most commonly, the default settings for various applications are not always appropriate for the standards of performance. Here are a few simple tips to improve your site response times and reduce the load.

Virtual Private Servers – Configuring Apache Settings

Apache takes more room then it necessarily needs to when it is incorrectly configured, especially on virtual private servers. This is the first place you should look when it comes to optimising your server. There are many settings such as KeepAlive, StartServers, MaxClients and MaxRequestsPerChild which can be optimised for providing a better performing server.

Maintaining an Updated MySQL Version and Caching Your Content

Using any other versions of MySQL other than MySQL 5.5 or 5.6, no longer have security updates and it is important to maintain an updated version to peak performance and security for your virtual private servers. Older versions may have a negative impact on your site’s performance and that is why sticking with the newest version will continue to help your VPS run smoothly.  Caching to RAM will speed up processes and reduce latency through a temporary storage of frequently accessed data. Constantly asking for static files can be expensive in terms of resources and become a slow process, but if you cache that data to RAM, it will speed things up. There are specific caching softwares like Varnish, Memcached, Memcached with PHP and Squid. If you use WordPress for your websites, there are plugins that will provide the same things called WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache and WP Fastest Cache.

Optimise Your Content and Consider a CDN

An important part of performance for your servers is the content that is being delivered. With many useful online tools at no charge, you can analyse your website for more improvements. These useful tools will provide you with performance metrics and speed as well as give you tips to where your site and server could use some optimisation. It will also grade your site on various factors and advise you to how you can improve from both your backend servers and frontend website configurations. Investing in a CDN (content delivery network) can shorten the space between the visitors of the website and your server. This can be done by it storing static content on nodes globally, which will allow for faster content delivery and better performance.

It is always better to keep up with updated Virtual Private Servers optimisation, so that way your online business can run more efficiently and help the growth and changes that comes with your business. Contact us now on how we can help you optimise your site for a better performance at www.bytehouse.co.uk.