Learn how to setup, configure, secure, optimize, and create a low-maintenance website the AskApache way. I'm piecing together all the hacks, tricks, methods, and ideas discussed throughout this blog and all across Netdom and glueing them all together to show you how to have the most optimized, crazy fastest, and best website setup I can think of.
Hosting Apache HTTP Server Caching Htaccess HTTP linux operating systems round-robin DNS technology Web Developer Web server

3-Part article covering practical implementation of 3 advanced .htaccess features. Discover an easy way to boost your SEO the AskApache way (focus on visitors), a tip you might keep and use for life. Get some cool security tricks to use against spammers, crackers, and other nefarious sorts. Take your site's error handling to the next level, enhanced ErrorDocuments that go beyond 404's.
Htaccess SSI
2 awesome ways to implement caching on your website using Apache .htaccess or httpd.conf. Both methods are extremely simple to set up and will dramatically speed up your site! Htaccess Cache Cache-Control ETag Expires Header Headers Htaccess mod_expires mod_headers
This is not your everyday vimrc. This is my personalized vimrc.. works especially great on remote servers, in tmux, screen, etc.
This doesn't require a git checkout, a vim update, a bash update, an OS update, a plugin. No. 1 vimrc, 1 colorscheme, just use curl to download and it's on. I use this on Arch Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, Cent OS, Red Hat, and that's mostly it so far.
If you aren't already using vim as your primary editor in a powerful way, you are gonna owe me for this.
Linux .vimrc 256 Color Vim
Apache server performance can be improved by adding additional hardware resources such as RAM, faster CPU, etc. Optimization
After I optimized the caching for my non-dynamic pages using apache modules mod_headers and mod_expires, I began to learn about phpbb seo..
Htaccess Htaccess PhpBB
I have written more than a few articles detailing how to improve the speed of a website, and due to popular demand, this post will detail all the latest and greatest caching tricks and techniques that I utilize and love. The AskApache Best-Practices.
Optimization
Very nice tutorial dealing with the robots.txt file. Shows examples for google and other search engines. Wordpress robots.txt and phpBB robots.txt sample files. SEO
There are so many WordPress plugins out there now that I wanted to post my favorite 3 plugins for speeding up a WP-Powered blog. These are the 3 plugins that I install for pretty much all of my WP-Powered sites, which I run about 300 now. They work together to provide a very optimized blog for speed.
DB-Cache Reloaded does something entirely different, it saves the mysql queries that are made to the WP-database, as well as the mysql results to static files, and then through php serves those cached-files instead of re-querying the mysql database. Most mysql databases are stored on separate servers, and although many are on the same local network there is a limit to how many queries, and how many connections can take place.
So DB-Cache Reloaded basically makes WP-Super Cache work alot faster when generating the cache files, and DB-Cache Reloaded helps in a number of areas un-related to WP-Super Cache, like in the admin panel. And DB-Cache without WP-Super-Cache is a joke because it still uses the application-level and php for everything. Gotta use both (or just WPSC).
WordPress Cache Web server wordpress
Search Engine Optimization for WordPress WordPress
Here is even more information from the Ultimate Htaccess Part I. For now this is very rough and you will want to come back later to read it.
Htaccess Apache HTTP Server Htaccess World Wide Web
Google's mod_pagespeed speeds up your site and reduces page load time. This open-source Apache HTTP server module automatically applies web performance best practices to pages, and associated assets (CSS, JavaScript, images), all transparently like a Squid Proxy.
With TMPFS you can dramatically improve the speed of mod_pagespeed and the webpages served by it. TMPFS will store/serve the optimized PageSpeed output directly from RAM!
Hosting Apache Google mod_pagespeed Nginx PageSpeed RAM tmpfs
Google DNS Google Google Public DNS performance tools web performance
This is part II of the Advanced SEO used on AskApache.com Series and describes how to control which urls are indexed by Search Engines and how to move them higher up in Search Results.
SEO
One of the most cost-effective ways to drive traffic to your Web site is to optimize it for search engines. Many of them use automated programs called "crawlers" or "spiders" to create an index of the Web, which they use to determine what sites are most relevant to users' queries. These programs essentially visit Web sites, read the pages' content, and follow any links to other pages, repeating the process
SEO
To prepare for several upcoming articles on AskApache that are focused on optimizing Servers and Sites from a server admin level, here is an article to introduce the main tools that we will be using. These tools are used to optimize CPU time for each process using nice and renice, and other tools like ionice are used to optimize the Disk IO, or Disk speed / Disk traffic for each process. Then you can make sure your mysqld and httpd processes are always fast and prioritized.
Optimization CFQ Idle linux Linux scheduler Load Nice RAM Scheduling algorithms
SSLOptions +StrictRequire
SSLRequireSSL
SSLRequire %{HTTP_HOST} eq "google.com"
ErrorDocument 403 https://google.com
Some of the Ins and Outs of using SSL Connections with Apache.
Htaccess 301 Redirects Htaccess mod_rewrite SSL
WordPress robots.txt file can make a huge impact on your WordPress blogs traffic and search engine rank. This is an SEO optimized robots.txt file. SEO robots.txt
How I was able to preload many flash flv and swf files on one of my clients sites that has a lot of online video and relatively small traffic. Their site visitors would usually watch 3-10 videos per visit and so to make the videos load almost instantly on every page I came up with a way to preload the top 10 .flv files and the swf flv player files as soon as the visitor successfully started watching the 1st video. Of course I also setup .htaccess caching on the server so that once they downloaded the files into their cache they would never request them from the server again. I was having fun with this so its pretty funky and uses some really cool combinations of javascript, swf preloader from xml, css classes to help automate it all..
Optimization Actionscript Cache Caching Flash flv Htaccess preload SWF
Grab the latest php.ini developmental version and discover new or previously hidden php runtime configuration settings... ahead of everyone else!
PHP
Check out this free online SEO site-scoring tool. The SEO generated report is simple, neat, and helpful. The main thing I like about it is how it is a stand-alone website, a residual money making machine.
Software
Linux firewall nmap
Orig published 2006. I had a CD-RW drive but being a computer security researcher I had no money for blank cd-recordables. What follows is how I managed to install various operating systems on my computer (1 hard drive) without having to burn to a CD the ISO and then boot from that.
And also:
==Phrack Inc.==
Volume 0x0b, Issue 0x3f, Phile #0x0a of 0x14
|=-----------------=[ Hacking Grub for fun and profit ]=-----------------=|
Linux bash GRUB iso linux OS Phrack USB
Sometimes there is an urgent need for creating an exact duplicate or "mirror" of a web site on a separate server. This could be needed for creating Round Robin Setups, Load-Balancing, Failovers, or for just plain vanilla backups. In the past I have used a lot of different methods to copy data from one server to another, including creating an archive of the whole directory and then using scp to send the file over, creating an archive and then encrypting it and then sending that file over using ftp, curl, etc., and my persistence at learning new ways to do things has paid off because now I use rsync to keep an exact replica of the entire directory on an external server, without having to use all the CPU and resources of other mirroring methods.
Security rsync ssh
The bottom line for this article is that I want to make WordPress as fast, secure, and easy to install, run, and manage because I am using it more and more for client production sites, I will work for days in order to solve an issue so that I never have to spend time on that issue again. Time is money in this industry and that is ultimately (time) what there is to gain by tweaking WordPress.
Note: I spent no time on readability, this is primarily a read the code and figure it out article.. This is for advanced users looking for a reference or discussion and for those of you looking to advance. Feedback would be great if you make it that far..
WordPress wordpress wp-config.php