This certainly used to be known as “Dog-Fooding” in more than one big IT setup. Still I’m quite happy with how this site runs, and hopefully so will you.

Although this specific to WordPress, a lot of the technology used is applicable to web hosting in general. I know how to squeeze the most out of your VPS to run Magento or just about anything else you like.

This site is hosted on an Amazon AWS t2.micro Instance, so no-one can accuse me of over specifying the hardware. If you haven’t used AWS before then you will qualify for the AWS free usage tier and I’d be delighted to help you migrate over to it.

Enough talk, here are some detailed measurements of the performance of this site.

Well, there are some things that can come back to bite you when you copy’n’paste stuff that you find with google.

One client was very patient with me today whilst some serious head scratching happened today whilst we tried to work out why we had broken the shopping cart on one vhost on the same server, but not another, with identical versions of opencart running in the background. I was all ready to give up and put in a “don’t cache this site/VHOST” entry into the VCL, when something caught my eye.

# Cache the following files extensions
if (req.url ~ “\.(css|js|png|gif|jp(e)?g|swf|ico)”) { unset req.http.cookie; }

Read that regexp carefully. Yes it doesn’t do quite what you expect it to.

if (req.url ~ “\.(css|js|png|gif|jp(e)?g|swf|ico)$”) { unset req.http.cookie; }

Works much more consistently, and more to the point as intended.

Pay attention to the detail, and remember there is always a reason for strange behaviour, the code only follows the rules we give it.