Tips for Server Admins & Website Owners

Server AdminsI have been writing a lot of tutorials about software installations, server security and lots, but I haven’t told about tips to keep in mind while managing a server right? Well here it is! This is about you guys who manages servers by yourself.

Backup

Always always always backup your server and websites, we cannot actually predict when the server crashes or hacked. If you don’t have a proper backup solution which is ready to restore your websites at any time, then you would be in trouble!

If you are a server administrator then you would know how to backup your server using rsync method or cPanel Backups (of course the data should be stored on another server or another partition of the same server). You should use daily backups as it will really help a lot, and at least 1 month data should be preserved. You can ask your server provider and see if they could arrange you a separate hard disk for backups or FTP Space.

If your using shared hosting or managed hosting, contact your host and ask if they have proper backup solutions and of course, you should backup your websites once a week atleast just to make sure nothing goes wrong!

Speed

Speed of a website is surely an important factor! The faster your server is, visitors would love it! Even search engines which crawls your site should not experience any slowness as it would affect indexing – sometimes if server is too slow, there is surely a possibility of not getting that particular site not to be indexed! If your site is slow then visitors would surely wont wait until the page loads instead they will go back to search and try the next website related to the current page.

You can improve your server speed by installing appropriate cache systems, If your using WordPress CMS, then you might wanna check out their popular cache plugin created by Frederick Townes named W3 Total Cache. You may want to check out great settings for W3 Total Cache for making you site faster.

If your a server admin, you would like to check out Nginx or Litespeed too! Litespeed isn’t free but Nginx is free 😉

Optimize

Are you a PHP programmer or a theme developer? Here are some tips for you to optimize your sites.

Code as simple as possible, make sure you don’t convert static lines to dynamic, like for example in WordPress themes and all you can actually save some PHP process by viewing the source of your website and comparing with the original code as you need only some codes like wp_title() to be executed.

Make sure you optimize your MySQL tables at least monthly for high traffic websites. Its there in PHPMyAdmin or you can get plugins which optimize your database in WordPress.

CDN

You can use a CDN service which can make your site faster! One that i recommend is CloudFlare which is an excellent provider which is free!

CloudFlare operates out of 14 data centers around the world. CloudFlare CDN automatically caches your static files at their edge nodes so these files are stored closer to your visitors while delivering your dynamic content directly from your web server. CloudFlare then uses a technology called Anycast to route your visitors to the nearest data center. The result is that your website, on average, loads twice as fast for your visitors regardless of where they are located. It saves your website’s bandwidth, protects from DDoS attacks & gives free IPv6 for your site too! See Tharun’s review of CloudFlare




July 9, 2012
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