From WP Engine’s Press Release:

We’ve built “TachyCache” which is a Tachyon-based caching system that pre-renders pages before a site visitor even clicks on a link….using quantum entangled cookies our system knows when users will load your page and is able to pre-render page content from within a time dilation field.  Essentially, we can build pages in the past and use them in the present so content is served instantly to the browser (requires the latest version of WebKit to work).

Read the full statement and signup details here.

It’s obvious that this drastically changes the hosting landscape and WP Engine’s pre-cog servers are definitely the must-have feature for anyone serious about page-load performance.  Just how well does it work?  We’ve been beta testing it here for at least a day.   Didn’t know you were gonna read this article today did ya?  Well, WP Engine did.

What’s everyone’s thoughts on this?  Feel free to let us know in the comment section below!

Sound interesting?

Introducing NodeKi: A New WordPress Hosting Company

NodeKi is a new WordPress hosting company that offers a unique pricing structure, which includes Lifetime Hosting plans. They started providing WordPress hosting solutions to both public and private businesses last year. So far in 2012 NodeKi has been undergoing a massive overhaul and adding new servers, resources and staff in preparation for launching their new products. They’re a team of four employees currently located in eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia.

Lifetime Hosting:

Since the company started they have focused on their Lifetime hosting packages. Pricing for the Lifetime WordPress Hosting packages starts at just $39.00 USD. NodeKi will continue to offer Lifetime hosting plans when they relaunch and will also introduce their brand new line of secure, optimized WordPress VPS’s with their custom LNVMP Stack & CPanel/WHM.

Lock in Early Bird Pricing Now…

NodeKi will be relaunching on April 1st. Their current pricing will increase $10 per plan and the limited time pricing will not be available anymore. You have just a few days left to purchase your lifetime hosting plan to lock in your early bird discount.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback for the NodeKi team, they’re available to assist you. Feel free to drop them an email at hello@nodeki.com.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

As it is, normal WordPress hosting can be very cheap, especially if you have modest requirements for your site. For a few bucks a month, you can get shared hosting with a reliable provider, and this will serve you just fine, in the early days at least.

WordPress hosting rarely breaks the bank

Even so, merely “cheap” ain’t good enough for some folk. There will always be the austere penny pinchers who want their hosting, like the WordPress software, to cost nothing at all.

And there are, indeed, many providers who will host your site free of charge. So if you’re determined to get your own self-hosted WordPress site on the web site without spending a cent, read on to learn more.

Is free WordPress hosting for me?

That depends. If all you want is a basic WordPress blog, and you’re not interested in serious development or design modifications, you’re better off going with the hosted WordPress.com service. It’s quick, painless, reliable and free.

Yet for all its convenience, WordPress.com is fairly restrictive in terms of how much control you have over your site. To edit your theme’s CSS file, for example, you need to purchase an “upgrade”, which will cost you $30 a year – not much cheaper than a basic shared hosting plan.

So if you want to experience WordPress in its raw and fully-customizable state, but refuse to open your wallet for the privilege, then free hosting might be the solution for you.

What to expect from a free WordPress hosting provider

Advertising

Most free hosting providers will incorporate advertising into their services in one way or another. (They’re still running a business, after all).

You might be required to leave an attribution link in the footer of your site, or even display a banner advert for the hosting company (although there are plenty of free hosts who don’t require this).

Aggressive sales tactics

Most companies that offer free WordPress hosting are running a kind of “freemium” business model, where they give you a basic service for free, and then try very hard to upsell you to paid hosting or some other product or service. So expect plenty of marketing emails from your host.

Limited storage space and bandwidth

This varies widely among free hosting providers, but in general you are always going to get a smaller slice of the pie than you would with a paid hosting plan. If you’re a casual blogger, this isn’t such an important issue, but if you’re running a big heavy WordPress site then it definitely will be.

Limited support

This is the biggest gamble that you take with free hosting. Any semi-respectable commercial hosting provider will have a customer support system in place, with a hotline that you can call whenever things go pear-shaped.

Don’t expect as much from free WordPress hosting. If your site suddenly disappears off the face of the planet one day, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to get it back. If you’re lucky, the host will have a support forum where you can post questions, and maybe a contact email address. Some even have phone numbers.

But don’t assume that anyone will go out of their way to help you. With free hosting, support is a bonus, not a given.

So is free WordPress hosting worth it?

For 90% of WordPress users, the answer is probably no. If you have any sort of ambition to build a stable, decent-traffic site, then free hosting ain’t gonna cut the mustard. With entry-level shared hosting plans available so cheaply, the risks and compromises involved with free hosting hardly seem worth the trouble.

Nonetheless, if you’re part of that hardcore puritan demographic who don’t believe in spending money if there’s a way around it, then you might be tempted to try your luck with free WordPress hosting and see how it works out.

Some free WordPress hosting providers to consider

• BYET Host
• Freehostia
• Zymic
• 000 Web Host

These are just a few examples. You’ll find plenty more options out there, legitimate and otherwise. Use common sense and always do your homework first. If some outlandish claim sounds too good to be true, there’s probably a catch.

Over to you – what are your thoughts on free WordPress hosting? Have you ever used it? Tell us about your experiences, whether positive or negative.

_{Photos: The Planet, Adonis Hunter and Bigstockphoto (Free).}

Restore Checkpoints is just like a time machine for your WordPress site

WP Engine, the WordPress hosting and security service, has just released Restore Checkpoints, a service that allows users to return to previous versions of their WordPress site. You may already be familiar with wp Time Machine, a plugin that creates an archive of all your WordPress data and files and then stores them on Dropbox, Amazon S3 or your FTP host. WP Engine basically does the same thing for their hosting customers with this new service, only in a fully managed way.

“I know enough to be dangerous…”

Many well-intending WordPress site owners love to log in and tinker with settings, plugins and widgets but sometimes a little bit of knowledge and ambition can crash a site. If you deploy something that breaks your site or if something goes horribly wrong, Restore Checkpoints will allow you to return your site back to working condition with just the click of a button. While you’re sleeping, Restore Checkpoints automatically creates new restore points for your site at 3AM each morning.

This service is bundled together with WP Engine’s WordPress hosting service, so it is only available to WP Engine users. If you are a high-energy WordPress user who needs this extra level of security and wants the convenience of managed snapshots of your WordPress site integrated with your hosting, you may want to stop over to WP Engine and take a look around.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

You may have heard about Amazon Web Services (AWS), or more specifically their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Have you heard about the free usage tier though? I’m sure this is supposed to be like a gateway drug where you try out AWS and you are hooked.  Just check out what all you can get for free (for a year) below!

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage*
• 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
• 100 MB of storage, 5 units of write capacity, and 10 units of read capacity for Amazon DynamoDB.**
• 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
• 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
• 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**
• 10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests**

As of January 18, 2012 (http://aws.amazon.com/free/).

Now to redeem your free servers (yes, plural — notice both Linux AND Microsoft above) all you need to do is click here and sign up. Now this will require both a credit card on file as well as going through an automated phone verification process. This is painless enough and even though some people are unhappy with it if you are a legitimate user you should not have any problems with getting through registration in a few minutes, and I just spun up both a Windows and Linux server both ready to go in less than 60 seconds.

In the coming future there will be many new articles on how to setup your own servers and different things you can use a server for over shared hosting. This would be a great (free/cheap) way to try out some ideas. Amazon AWS may or may not be right for you in the long run, and coming soon I will go over how to choose a good hosting provider. For now… enjoy the free ride!

Webuzo

One option you have is by using Webuzo. Webuzo is a software that will give your virtual (or dedicated) server a control panel where you can install apps with just a few clicks just like with your shared hosting. With just a few commands from your SSH console Webuzo will install Apache, MySQL, PHP, DNS, FTP, and a few other odds and ends for you. Once complete you have your own full control panel on your own web server. Now Webuzo is not free, there is a $2.50/mo (or $25/yr) fee. However there is a 15 30 day free trial for you to try it out. When I originally wrote this the trial was only 15 days, but I got in touch with the COO Pulkit Gupta (aka. Alons) and we doubled that to 30!

System Requirements

Webuzo does require that your server is running CentOS 5 with YUM installed (usually is there by default). Personally I have it running on 5.6, but feel free to run 5.5 or your preferred CentOS 5.X version. I did not try running this on CentOS 6.0 as it is not “officially” supported per their wiki, per Alons it has been tested though.

To check what version of CentOS you are running as well as if YUM is installed we are going to run a few commands. The first will tell us the CentOS version and the second will return the YUM version if it installed, otherwise it will fail.

cat /etc/redhat-release
yum --version

How to Install

The install for Webuzo is one of the easiest installs you will perform on your server. There are only three lines. You download the install file, you set permissions on the install file, then you run the install file. Run the three commands below to begin.

wget -N http://files.webuzo.com/install.sh
chmod 0755 install.sh
./install.sh

The install will sit there and run silently installing almost everything you will ever need on your web server. Just sit back and relax. Feel free to pick up your cup of hot chocolate while you wait. Once completed you will get a screen like the one below.

Configure Webuzo

Once you have completed the install, you need to browse to the URL the installer gives you. This should be http://yourip:2004/, if you are not familiar with numbers on the ends of your domains or IP’s, this is simply using a port other than the standard port 80.
Once you fill out the form with your email, password, domain, and nameservers you will be prompted for a key.

At this point you most likely do not have a key. In the license key description there is a link to get a free 15 day trial license, click this and you will then need to create an account. Once your account is created you will get to a screen like the one below. Here simply choose “VSP Server” (or the applicable choice) and then enter your server’s IP address. Then click “Get Trial.”

Once you click “Get Trial” you will need to click the “My Licenses” link under Webuzo and you can retrieve your key.

Enter your key and then click “Install Webuzo” to complete your install. You will get two URL’s at the final screen as well as a username. Port 2004 is going to be your server admin panel, while 2002 is your application admin panel.

Install WordPress

To install WordPress browse to http://www.yourdomain.com:2002/, you should already be logged in but if prompted for a username and password the username is “soft” and the password is the one you created. If you have ever used Softaculous from cPanel before then this will be a familiar interface. Simply click on Blogs in the top left then click on WordPress, and finally click Install.

Fill out the form with where you want the WordPress website to be installed to. Choose if you want to use www or not, if you want the site to be at the root of the domain then clear out the “In Directory” box. You can even customize the database name and table prefix if you’d like. Once you click Install it will install WordPress for you.

Thats it! You have installed Webuzo and WordPress! You can also use this to install 250+ other open source softwares. For a full list check out Webuzo’s Apps page.

Photo by: rfktech9

Shared hosting can only take you so far when you are trying to build a website. At a certain point you are going to realize that your website just isn’t loading quickly enough for you and you want a bit more power behind it. In an age where site speed makes all the difference you have probably already tried to squeeze every bit of optimization out of your site with caching plugins. It would be great to have a dedicated server, but that would get a bit expensive ($100+/month).

One common option is to use a VPS, or virtual private server. Essentially this is taking a dedicated server and running multiple completely independent operating systems off it. This gives you “dedicated-like” hardware without the costs of a dedicated server. You have a very wide selection to choose from as far as hosts and options go, although my own personal preference is Rackspace Cloud.

Today I’m going to concentrate on setting up your own VPS running Nginx (pronounced en•gine x) as your web server on Ubuntu (pronounced oo•boon•tu) which is your base OS, or operating system.

What is Nginx?

Nginx is a web server software that allows your server to serve files. Nginx is fairly new to the web server work, relative to other popular web servers. If you look at the graph below you can see Apache as the “top dog” going all the way back to before 1995, while Nginx just starts showing up in March 2007.

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains (December 2011)

But even though it is a fairly new software Nginx already has over 8% market share, and powers 11.6% of the world’s active sites. For more information you can visit nginx.com and nginx.org.

Getting Started

If you are new to managing your own VPS, then you should read up on SSH (secure shell). Depending on your local OS, there are a wide variety of options for SSH. For Windows users I recommend PuTTY, which I will be using during this tutorial. All other OS typically have a built in method; OS X and Linux have terminal and on Chrome OS you can press Control+Alt+T for your terminal.

I won’t get into much detail with how apt-get works but, unlike Windows, where you download installers and then run them to install software, Ubuntu offers an Advanced Packaging Tool, or apt. Within apt on Ubuntu you have lists of software available to install, you can easily install these using simple commands through command line.

1. Add and Update your Lists

The first apt command is used to update your software lists. If you do not update your list you may end up installing an old version of software or the software might not be available. In this case we have to update our list so we can install python-software-properties. This software will allow us to easily add other lists from Launchpad.net.

Enter the commands below. You’ll notice the first command is apt-get not apt. Anything after the pound sign is a comment simply explaining more about what the command does.

apt-get update # updates your available software list
apt-get upgrade # upgrades all your currently installed software
apt-get install python-software-properties # installs python-software-properties
add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/stable # adds a list for nginx
add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/php5 # adds a list for php5
add-apt-repository ppa:nijel/phpmyadmin # adds a list for phpmyadmin
apt-get update # once we have new lists added we have to update them

2. Install Nginx & PHP

Now that all your lists are up-to-date with the required software, you need to install Nginx and PHP5.

apt-get install nginx php5-fpm php5-cli php5-curl php5-gd php5-mcrypt php5-mysql

3. Install MySQL and phpMyAdmin

Unless you have a remote database host (if you have to ask you don’t have one), you need to install mysql-server. I also recommend phpMyAdmin since that is what you are probably most familiar with.

apt-get install mysql-server phpmyadmin

During this process you will be prompted for a few passwords and asked if you want to auto-configure your web server.

First of all, set your root MySQL password. You will also be asked to confirm your password.

Now, auto-configure phpMyAdmin for a web server. Since Nginx is not available in this list just hit OK.

To get from the selection list to OK hit the tab key on your keyboard.

phpMyAdmin will then configure your MySQL server so it can access and manage it.

Choose “Yes”, you do want to configure database for phpmyadmin.

phpMyAdmin will also need its own user to access the MySQL server. It will generate the username “phpmyadmin” itself but you have the option of choosing a password. First it will ask you for your root password, then you have the option of creating a password or just hitting enter with the box blank to generate a random one.

4. Start Nginx and PHP

Now that all your software is installed you need to start the service. Unlike Apache you need to start PHP as its own service. Nginx cannot natively process PHP files so you are going to tell it to pass those files off to PHP-FPM’s service to process instead.

service nginx start
service php5-fpm start

5. Add another User to Ubuntu

I know I said you are not going to setup security, but this next step does touch on this. You do not ever want your websites or services to be running as root. This is dangerous and can really hurt you, so we are going to add a new user to the server.

Enter the next command and follow the prompts to create the user.

adduser www

6. Download WordPress

Now that your new user is created, start another SSH session with your VPS and this time login as www instead of root. In order to configure Nginx for your websites you need to setup a few files.

mkdir -p logs/wordpress # creates the directory logs, with wordpress inside
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz # download the latest wordpress install
tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz # extract the archive files

7. Create your Virtual Host

At this point we are done with your session as www, so you can exit that. In your root session you need to change directory (cd) to the “sites-available” Nginx folder. From here we’ll delete the default Nginx page from the “sites-enabled” directory by using the “rm” command.

Next download a premade WordPress+phpMyAdmin configuration file from my GitHub repo using wget.

Finally, create a symlink for your configuration in “sites-enabled” using the “ln –s” command. When you reload Nginx’s configurations it will stop serving the default page and now start serving your WordPress site you just downloaded.

Here are the commands:

cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
rm ../sites-enabled/default
wget https://raw.github.com/patrickgarman/LEMP-Setup/master/wordpress
ln -s ../sites-available/wordpress ../sites-enabled/wordpress
service nginx reload

8. Configure PHP

There is one last configuration change you need to make sure your server runs smoothly. Configure PHP5-FPM to run as the www user you created before.

To do this you will use Nano to edit your PHP5-FPM to run the service as www. When in nano you will need to use your arrow keys to scroll down to around line 53-54 (you can use control+C to find your position).

When you see where you set the user and group, change it from “www-data” to “www”

nano /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

To save your changes, press control+X and follow the prompts.

Restart PHP5-FPM using the command below and you are ready to install WordPress!

service php5-fpm restart

9. Create your User/Database in phpMyAdmin

To install WordPress you need to create a database.

Open up your web browser and browse to http://www.yourdomain.com/phpmyadmin. You should arrive at the phpMyAdmin login screen where you can login as your root MySQL user with the password you created earlier.

Now follow the steps below to create your new user and database.

1. Click “Privileges” and click “Add a new User”

   

2. Type in a username and a password, feel free to have one generated by phpMyAdmin then choose “Local” for host, this will lock the user down to only connecting from this server

   

3. Under “Database” choose “Create database with the same name and grant all privileges” then click “Create User”

10. Install WordPress

Browse to http://www.youdomain.com/ and install WordPress as normal. Your database name and username will be the same as the username you just created.

Congratulations! You have installed WordPress!

The unsurprising results for Godaddy

Here’s a brief breakdown of the results. You should definitely check out the post on WPShout though, which gives a whole lot more detail than I have here.

Avoid

• 1&1
• GoDaddy
• MediaTemple
• VPS.net

Consider

• Dreamhost
• Hostgator

Recommended

• BigWetFish
• Blue Host
• Heart Internet
• WPWebHost
• Site5
• Zybriter
  

Who do you host with? Is your favourite hosting provider on there? Do you think WPShout has got it right or got it wrong?

The bad news: if you run WordPress, then sooner or later, you’ll have to understand caching. Caching is critical to site performance. And performance, as Siobhan noted, is critical to the success of your Web sites: if they bog down, both your direct traffic and your search engine rankings will suffer. But here’s the good news: caching’s not that bad! Caching only seems confusing because there are so many options available.

Rack of Servers. Sung to the tune of Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages". (Yes, I'm old...thanks for asking.)

In the first of this two-part series, I’ll cover the basics of caching, why it’s important, and the (many) types of caching available on both your users’ computers and your Web server. I’ll even discuss a few non-caching performance optimizations that are included in the most popular WordPress caching plugins. In the next article, I’ll review the various plugins available for WordPress caching, and attempt to address the largest questions WPMU readers have asked us about optimizing their WordPress-powered Web sites.

What is Caching?

To understand caching better, let’s look at how data flows from your site to your users. WordPress has to shuttle a lot of data around between several computers, usually over long distances. The following diagram is a simplified rendition of how data flows between a Web browser and your WordPress Web site.

A simple depiction of how data flows between a user and your WordPress site.

Here’s what happens when a user types in http://www.YourAwesomeWordPressWebsite.com/:

1. The user’s browser contacts your Web server. This user may be any physical distance from your Web server – either down the street at a coffee shop, or halfway around the world.
2. Your WordPress installation contacts the database where it’s installed (which is often hosted on a separate machine) to fetch your posts and other stored data.
3. The Web server compiles this data into an HTML page, and returns it to the user.

At a minimum, then, your Web site’s data must travel between three computers. What if we could speed up all this data transfer by taking some shortcuts? For example:

• What if the user’s Web browser didn’t re-request your banner image each time the user pressed F5, but instead kept that image on her local hard drive until you changed it?
• What if, instead of calling its MySQL database for every page request, WordPress kept the results of previous database requests around until you made a change to the database (such as posting a new article)?

That, my friends, is caching. Caching is reusing data from previous requests to speed up subsequent requests. In the example above, caching is used to minimize the amount of data that must flow between machines across the Internet. This results in fewer requests between machines, which translates into a speed boost for your Web site.

While caching can be used to minimize the flow of traffic between machines, this isn’t its only use. Caching can be employed whenever it would prevent your client’s Web browser or your Web server from performing any operation that is both (1) time-consuming and (2) redundant.

How Caching Can Help Your Site

A beginning user who installs a WordPress caching plug-in will be blown away by the number of caching options available. Before we dig into the mechanics of adding caching to your site, let’s review the various types of objects that can be cached on both the client (Web browser) and the server (WordPress/PHP).

Client-Side Caching

Every Web browser keeps a local cache of all of the HTML files, images, Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) and JavaScript files it has downloaded from a given Web site. Your WordPress site can take advantage of the client-side cache by establishing caching rules for its content. When cache controls are properly set on images and scripts, a Web browser will ask the server if the content has changed since it was last downloaded. If it hasn’t changed, the browser will use its locally cached copy, instead of retrieving the entire item.

This negotiation occurs unknown to the user using the Web’s protocol language, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). We can observe this dance with an HTTP sniffing tool such as Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler for Windows. In the screenshot of Fiddler below, we see how the Web browser (Chrome) requests an image from my Web site using the HTTP If-Modified-Since header:

An HTTP request for an image from JayAllenWrites.com, as seen using Eric Lawrence's Fiddler for Windows

In this case, the image in this blog post hasn’t changed since I uploaded it, so my Web server responds with an HTTP 304 “Not Modified” status code:

The HTTP response for the above request. Since the image hasn't changed since the If-Modified-Since date, my Web server doesn't return the actual data.

Most images are static; they rarely change after an article is posted. Client-side caching of such static content greatly reduces site load times, and reduces the overall burden on your Web server.

Server-Side Caching

Server-side caching refers to the various types of caching performed by your WordPress server. A WordPress installation running a caching plugin can cache various kinds of data, including:

• HTML pages. WordPress stores your Web site’s pages in parts. When a page is requested, WordPress must combine the various parts of your template – your header, body content, footer, sidebar template, etc. – with the post data it retrieves from MySQL to create the full HTML page that is returned to the user. HTML page caching saves these constructed pages, serving them to multiple users.
• MySQL database query results. Instead of asking your MySQL database to return the same 10 posts 1,000 times, you can cache the result of a single query, and keep it on your Web server until you post a new article, update an existing article, or change your WordPress configuration options.
• Object caching. WordPress has an object caching API that caches certain programmatic objects it uses in memory. By default, this caching only lasts for the lifetime of a single request. As we’ll see in my next article, some WordPress caching plugins enhance and optimize this API by reusing objects between requests.
• PHP opcode caching. As mentioned above, all PHP pages must be compiled into code that a computer can execute. Opcode caching saves this compiled code between requests. Less compilation means less work for the server, faster server response times, and…oh, you know the rest.

Disk Caching vs. Memory Caching on the Server

Most WordPress caching plugins support caching all of this server-side data in one of two ways: on the disk, or in memory. Since accessing memory is orders of magnitude faster than accessing a hard drive, caching data in memory provides the biggest speed bump. However, most sites that are hosted on a shared server (i.e., most WordPress blogs with a basic account on a Web host) will need to use disk caching.

Other WordPress Speed Optimizations

There are other performance optimizations a WordPress-powered Web site can incorporate that fall outside of the realm of caching. Since most caching plugins support these optimizations, it’s important to understand what they are and how they work.

HTTP compression

All data sent over the HTTP protocol can be compressed on the server. This smaller data stream is then sent to the Web browser, which uncompresses and displays it. This reduces the number of bytes sent between your Web server and your users, resulting in decreased page load times. For more juicy details, see Sarah Goodling’s post on WordPress performance optimization.

Script and Stylesheet Minimization

Every image or script on your Web site must be loaded through a separate HTTP request from your browser. If you have 10 Javascript (.js) files on your Web site, a browser must make 10 separate requests to retrieve them. Lame! Tools such as Minify can combine multiple Javascript and CSS files into a single monolithic file, reducing the number of requests for your scripts from 10 down to one. Consult this other Sarah Goodling gem for all the gory details on Minify.

To Be Continued…

Enough of the preliminaries! Now that we’ve reviewed the basics, we can put them into action. In our next installment, we’ll review the most popular caching plugins for WordPress, and discuss how to configure them for various scenarios – shared servers, virtual private servers, dedicated hosts, and multisite configurations.

WordPress runs well on Windows. Full Stop. Period.

Those are the words uttered by Microsoft’s Andy Robb at WordCamp UK in Portsmouth last weekend as he took us through a journey through past, present and future.

Starting with the past, Andy conceded that previous versions of IIS (Microsoft’s server software and rival to Apache) was certainly not adequate, relying on slow CGI and unreliable ISAPI.

With IIS 7 he says the situation is much improved. A default installation is now much more minimal, using a streamlined processing pipeline and FastCGI for dealing with PHP requests (much-needed for running WordPress sites).

From a cursory glance at some benchmarking discussions on the web it sounds as though IIS7 really holds it’s weight against Apache servers now, especially with the latest versions of PHP. Andy’s presentation, which you can see below, goes into more detail about the best IIS setups for working with WordPress.

As well as much improved server software, Microsoft has developed a tool to help with developing and deploying WordPress sites.

WebMatrix effectively provides you with a Windows server right on your PC with one-click install for WordPress. You can setup and configure your WordPress site and then easily publish that site to your ‘live’ WordPress server.

It’s clear Microsoft are serious about WordPress having migrated over 30 million blogs from Windows Live to WordPress.com. They also have a site dedicated to WordPress and a blog where they cover all sorts of really interesting posts including features on WordPress.

So, will you be using WordPress on Windows?