Tweaking a Dedicated Virtual Web Server. Lowell is the founder and CEO of How-To Geek. He’s been running the show since creating the site back in 2006. Over the last decade, Lowell has personally written more than 1000 articles which have been viewed by over 250 million people. Prior to starting How-To Geek, Lowell spent 15 years working in IT doing consulting, minecraft dedicated server cybersecurity, database management, and programming work.

Read more. When you get a dedicated virtual server to run your website, chances are good that it’s configured for everybody, and not customized to maximize performance for If you enjoyed this information and you would such as to get additional facts regarding dedicated servers for rent kindly visit our own website. running a website. Contents. Overview. There’s a number of problem areas where we want to maximize performance: Linux configuration There are usually services running that don’t need to be, wasting memory that could be used for more connections. MySQL configuration Often the default settings are based on a small server, we can add a few key changes to increase performance a great deal.

Apache configuration By default most hosting providers install apache with nearly every module installed. There’s no reason to load modules if you aren’t ever going to use them. PHP configuration The default PHP configuration is similarly bloated, there are usually a ton of unnecessary extra modules installed. PHP Opcode Cache Instead of allowing PHP to recompile the scripts every single time, an opcode cache will cache the compiled scripts in memory for huge performance boosts.

Backups Should probably setup some automated backups, since your hosting provider isn’t going to do it for you. Security Sure, Linux is secure enough by default, but there’s usually some glaring security issues that you can fix with a few quick settings. Linux Configuration. There’s quite a number of tweaks you can do, which will vary slightly based on the server you are using. These tweaks are for a server running CentOS, dedicated ssd server but they should work for the majority of DV servers.

Disable DNS. If your hosting provider handles the DNS for your domain (likely), then you can disable the DNS service from running. The chmod command removes execute permission from the script, stopping it from running on startup. Disable SpamAssassain. If you aren’t using email accounts on your server itself, you shouldn’t bother running anti-spam tools. (Also you should check out Google Apps, much better email solution) Disable xinetd.

The xinetd process houses a number of other processes, none of which are useful for a typical web server. Limit Plesk Memory Usage. If you use the plesk panel, you can force it to use less memory by adding an options file. Add the following lines to the file: Note that this option is known to work on MediaTemple DV servers, but has not been checked on any others. (See References) Disable or Turn Off Plesk (optional) If you only use Plesk once a year, there’s very little reason to leave it running at all.

Note that this step is completely optional, and slightly more advanced. Run the following command to turn off plesk: You can disable it from running at startup by running the following command: Note that if you disable it, then you can’t start it manually without changing the file permissions back (chmod u+x).