Website overhaul

Finally it’s done!

RC-Thoughts.com has a totally new home. I was struggling to keep the old server up and running with all the bells and whistles I liked. This was basically due type of chosen virtual server, lack of resources on it and simply outdated software like Apache2.2 and PHP 5.6.

linux-tux-console

Geeky stuff anyone?

Old platform was quite simple, SSD-Cached OpenVZ with 4 Core CPU, 1Gb memory. And as said, running Apache 2.2 with PHP 5.6.

I tried PHP7 but was not happy, PHP just eats too much resources with wordpress. Also there was something strange in the config, web-server would give 500 Errors occasionally and without a trace anywhere. Those a now in the past too.

So, for starters I got myself a new server, it’s now running on Ramnode’s Premium KVM with 4 Core CPU, 2Gb memory and no cache on SSD.

I turned the back-end totally around too, RC-Thoughts is now running on Nginx + HHVM on server, no more resource-hungry PHP. (Actually whole server has no PHP installed at all).

One of the biggest improvements is leaving HTTP/1.1 behind and moving over to HTTP/2 since this is now possible. This has reduced traffic with ~20-35% per page-load.

Fine tuning the performance have taken better part of all evening in last two weeks but it was well worth it.

Load times?

I have been benchmarking the site a lot with GTmetrix and other similar tools. A few months ago I was at 5-7 seconds load-times on first page. Now a bit depending on readers location it can be under a second from US and under half a second from London. So, not bad in my book.

I will experiment with content delivery network in nearest days so these times will most likely improve. This should not give any downtime so no harm done there. I hope…

Pretty please…

If you notice anything strange in website behavior please drop me a line in here! Thanks in advance!

Thanks and best regards, Tero from RC-Thoughts.com

One thought on “Website overhaul

  1. Thanks for all your effort – I always enjoy reading your articles and helpful tips

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *