Droplet 2

As mentioned earlier, I finally dropped virtual host and rented myself a Droplet. It’s cheap, easy to setup, no downside yet (except that it’s a really small instance compare to what I work with during day times).

I’ve wanted to move our xiangpi.ca to a VPS for a long time now since I don’t like Wordpress without heavy optimizations. With a virtual host there wasn’t much I could do.

So here’s the extended list of what I’ve done:

1. apt-get install php-fpm mysql php-apc. I finally get to use a bytecode cache for PHP in a production environment now.
2. Configured another server block and content root for xiangpi.ca to be hosted here through Nginx.
3. Grabbed the latest Wordpress and placed it under the content root.
4. scped all the uploads to wp-content/uploads. I didn’t have to do this since I already use Jetpack Photon. But it’s always good to have a failover.
5. Imported the SQL dump through MySQL shell (which is horrible compare to MongoDB’s and Redis’). I didn’t do the XML export-import way since I co-author xiangpi.ca with my girlfriend together.
6. Configured xiangpi.ca name server to be CloudFlare’s.
7. Followed this guide to make Wordpress serve in-memory static contents through Redis.
8. Installed my favorite Wordpress plugins and picked a new cool theme.
9. Flipped the “CDN + Full Optimization” switch on CloudFlare for xiangpi.ca.

Without too much hassle (thanks to the Open Source community), I managed to make the great yet bloated blogware almost as fast as my true static blog. Cool. The reason why I chose Redis instead of Varnish (which is more popular for this particular use case), is because I want to maximize CloudFlare’s duty to cache those already static contents (JS, CSS, images), while using Redis only for generated HTML pages.

And really, why not Redis?

UPDATE 2013-05-15: The hacky solution of Redis served cache becomes a bit problematic. As blitz.io stress test revealed its instability, I decided to drop it and find a more sophisticated solution (despite the fact that I still LOVE Redis and use it everyday). I know that W3 Total Cache plugin for Wordpress does a great job interfacing with a variety of caching mechanisms including APC, Memcached and Varnish. But I quickly abandoned this plan because I only intent to use APC the lazy way, mostly for logged in users and wp-admin stuff; and I don’t trust Memcached or Varnish PHP driver’s performance.

So I Google’d around and found this. Brilliant solution! The only thing hacky here is that the needed purge module does not come with standard Nginx installation. The good news is that compiling Nginx with --add-module was a no brainer. As of now, with limited RUSH I could perform on blitz.io, my Wordpress driven site performs equally well as this true static site.