Securing Nginx with HTTPS

SSLAdding a certificate and using the HTTPS protocol is a good improvement to the security in the communication between the browser and the server, and should be in place on all sites that have a user login. Contrary to what many (older) guides say, it doesn’t add much load on your server and is fairy easy and cheap to set up right.Continue reading “Securing Nginx with HTTPS”

Install latest version of Nginx on Ubuntu

NginxI always run the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on all my servers. Unfortunately, the Nginx versions tend to be quite the bit behind the current release. So how do you get an updated, current version of without resorting to having to maintain the packages yourself? Luckily, the Nginx team have their own Ubuntu apt repository so it’s easy to keep current with the latest version of Nginx.Continue reading “Install latest version of Nginx on Ubuntu”

Install latest version of PHP on Ubuntu

PHPI always run the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on all my servers. Currently the latest LTS is 14.04 which comes with PHP version 5.5, but as of November 2014, the latest stable version is 5.6. So how do you get an updated, current version of PHP without resorting to having to maintain the packages yourself? The answer is in PPA.Continue reading “Install latest version of PHP on Ubuntu”

Publishing WordPress site from development to production server – or moving your WordPress installation from one host to another

WordPressYou have finished that WordPress site, and want to deploy it – move it from your test server to the production server where it goes live. But how? WordPress have a famous 5-minute-install, but there is no 5-minute-go-live-script*. I’ll show you how in these 5 easy-to-follow steps.Continue reading “Publishing WordPress site from development to production server – or moving your WordPress installation from one host to another”

Get your Ubuntu VPS up and running

UbuntuThese are the first steps you should perform on your shiny, brand new VPS to set out on a safe journey on the internets. You don’t actually have to understand each of the steps here, but this post is intented for people who have some clue of what they’re doing. If there is such a thing as a «VPSes for dummies», it should not be read. VPSes are not intended for dummies.

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Caching: Varnish or Nginx?

TL;DR: Varnish lacks support for SSL and SPDY. Nginx handles it just fine, and has very fast cache with either memcache or disk storage (ramdisk). Both can serve stale cache if your backend is down. But Nginx can not write to the memcache storage directly, it has to be done by the application. Also, Nginx can not purge the cache itself, without you compiling your own package.

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