Kevin Pirnie' Articles

By: Kevin On: August 3, 2018

Posted In: Hosting Server Management Software Updates dns hosting web hosting

This is a quick(ish) how to that you can do to utilize one of your registered domains on Amazon's Route53 service. Required: A registered Domain An account with Amazon's AWS, in particular, their Route53 service An IAM account, with API access to allow the creation, reading, and updating Route53 Domain records The AWS cli installed on a linux distro that you have shell access to A bit of patience Remembering what DNS propagation is like... How to do it: First things first, drop into shell on your linux machine and run the following command.  You will need to copy/paste it's output, so have your favorite text editor handy. aws route53 create-reusable-delegation-set --caller-reference $(date +%s%N) The output of this command should look similar to the following:… Read More

By: Kevin On: July 6, 2018

Posted In: Hosting Security Server Management Updates dns dns propagation hosting web hosting

Have you ever updated your domain’s A record and noticed that, for at least several hours, your new domain displayed the new site on one device (such as your smartphone), but the old site on another device, such as your home computer? Have you ever updated your domain’s MX records and found that, for at least several hours, not all new emails were delivered to the new email server you specified? I cannot count the number of times I have seen these sorts of situations cause website owners to panic, pull their hair out, or get frustrated with their hosting provider. So what exactly is going on, and what can you do about it? What is happening is that the change you made to your… Read More

By: Kevin On: July 1, 2016

Posted In: CSS Design Development Hosting Mobile First PHP Plugins Security Theme Development Updates Wordpress caching compression css design practices development javascript mobile first mobile friendly php speed up the web wordpress wordpress performance

In part I, I walked you through my server setup to achieve a 1 second load time for my site.  It is a Wordpress site, with a custom theme I developed. I gandered at the possibility of by-passing Wordpress's front-end engine, however, I found myself needing some of the built-in functionality Wordpress offers.  Items like custom posts, pages, and even posts are simple sql queries, however; widgets, shortcodes, and most plugins then become unavailable. So, I delved into the realm of research and found Wordpress core functionality offered the functionality I required, with very little performance hit; so I decided to simply extend some memcached functionality when pulling my pages/posts/widget/etc... The only thing I found that I lost was time, and in the end drastically improved the… Read More

By: Kevin On: June 10, 2016

Posted In: Development Hosting Lemp Commander Linux nGinx Security Security Server Management Software Theme Development Ubuntu Updates Wordpress bash nano nginx shell shell scripting speed up the web web hosting wordpress performance

I have successfully managed to get around a 1 second load time on my Wordpress site, While getting 250 concurrent users over a 1 minute test period.  (Source: https://webpagetest.org/result/210128_Di26_15d11aa18013d1df9ebc867e1aa9c2f3/) This was done with a combination of items, stemming from the server install up to Wordpress theme development.  Here is how I did it, so maybe you can too. Server Setup Here we will start from the ground up.  Items you will need: VirtualBox, Ubuntu 16.04 64b Server ISO, Time My virtual machine is setup with 4G of RAM, using 2 CPU's, with 80G SSD, and a Bridged Networking adapter Boot to the ISO, and start the installation process.  Everything can be setup how you wish, however, I custom partitioned, as well as, only installed the… Read More

By: Kevin On: May 12, 2015

Posted In: Hosting Linux nGinx Security Server Management Software Updates hosting nginx speed up the web web hosting

Do it Because They Do WordPress.com is the cloud version of WordPress that is hosted and supported by Automattic.WordPress.com serves more than 33 million sites attracting over 339 million people and 3.4 billion pages each month. Since April 2008, WordPress.com has experienced about 4.4 times growth in page views. WordPress.com VIP hosts many popular sites including CNN’s Political Ticker, NFL, Time Inc’s The Page, People Magazine’s Style Watch, corporate blogs for Flickr and KROQ, and many more. Automattic operates two thousand servers in twelve, globally distributed, data centers. WordPress.com customer data is instantly replicated between different locations to provide an extremely reliable and fast web experience for hundreds of millions of visitors. Problem WordPress.com, which began in 2005, started on shared hosting, much like all of the WordPress.org sites. It was… Read More