Fast, Scalable And Secure Web Hosting For Entrepreneurs: Learn to set up your server and website

Good website performance is becoming a top priority for many webmasters. This is because it gives the users of your site a better experience.

It also helps your ranking in search engines, which may offer you more free traffic from them. If you have an e-commerce site, several studies have shown that a faster website can increase the sale conversions, thus revenue!

Understanding the building blocks of your website will make sure that it can scale in popularity while keeping it stable and fast!

The first section of the book gives an overview on what to look for in a web hosting company. Where should you host your site and with whom? We will give you an overview of the alternatives and show you how you can choose the best solution for your specific use case.

After having chosen a webhosting package and server, we will install a Linux-based OS on our server. We’ll guide you through choosing and installing the right Linux distribution.

After the base OS installation has been completed, we’ll install and configure commonly used web software including

• Nginx webserver
• PHP
• PHP-FPM
• Memcached
• Java
• Jetty
• MariaDB database (drop-in replacement for MySQL)
• CSF Firewall
• WordPress
• Google’s PageSpeed plugin for nginx

We will also focus on tuning the OS for performance and scalability. Making your server and website secure (via HTTPS) is a hot topic since Google announced it can positively impact your Search Engine Rankings. We’ll describe how to enable HTTPS and secure connections to your website.

We’ll also explain technologies like SPDY, HTTP/2 and CDN and how they can help you to make your site faster for your visitors from all around the world.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Choosing Your Website Hosting
• Installing the Operating System
• Performance Baseline
• Tuning KVM Virtualization Settings
• Tuning Kernel Parameters
• Installing OpenSSL
• Securing your Server
• Ordering a Domain Name For Your Website
• Installing MariaDB 10, a MySQL Database Alternative
• Installing nginx Webserver
• Installing PHP
• Installing PHP-FPM
• Installing memcached
• Updating PHP To a New Version
• Installing ImageMagick for PHP
• Installing PHPMyAdmin
• Installing Java
• Installing Jetty
• Using a CDN
• HTTPS everywhere
• Configure Email For Your Domain
• Installing WordPress
• Optimizing WordPress performance
• Speed up your site with Google PageSpeed nginx plugin
• Appendix: Resources