4 Ways to Optimise Your VPS for Peak Performance
A Virtual Private Server is a fast, scalable and flexible hosting platform. VPS Hosting is popular for its speed and versatility. But what’s good can always be improved with a few key optimisations. Almost all website owners run their VPS Hosting on default settings. They do not think of changing the settings because VPS Server Hosting is already a fast web hosting solution.
With a few crucial optimisations to your hosting server, it will not only perform better but will also make it more efficient by reducing needless usage of resources. And, when you have VPS with cPanel, these optimisations become easier, and you will boost your hosting performance. Since Linux VPS Hosting is the more popular version of the platform, we will concentrate on the Linux side of things.
Here are four ways to optimise your VPS for peak performance that will elevate your VPS Hosting experience.
- Configure your Apache well
A badly configured Apache can be a notorious resource hog, especially on a VPS. So the first place to start your optimisations is with Apache. You will need to tweak various settings like KeepAlive, MaxClients, StartServers and MaxRequestsPerChild for better utilisation of available resources. Your KeepAlive should be set to ‘On’ unless you have a high volume or a load-balanced server. Set MaxKeepAliveRequests to ‘100’ and KeepAliveTimeout to 5. Restrict MaxClients to 150 to avoid queuing. Set StartServers to 5, which is the number of child server processes created on startup. The last thing you need to do is set MaxRequestsPerChild to 300, which controls the number of requests a child process will handle.
- Keep MySQL updated
A Linux VPS with cPanel uses MySQL database to store all the dynamic data on your website. It is constantly being updated to improve its security and performance. Once a version reaches ‘end of life’ (EOL), it is no longer supported by the vendor. It can create performance and security issues which could be harmful to your website data. Newer versions also bring performance optimisations with faster read/write speeds and response times. So make sure you keep your MySQL updated at all times.
- Optimise your content
Content makes or breaks your website’s user experience. Heavy, unoptimised content will hamper your website’s performance. E.g. an unnecessarily large media will hog bandwidth and hold up things as the browser waits for it to load. This degrades the user experience. Minify your code and shrink your media to shed the excess baggage. You will find a lot of online tools that will help you optimise your content. Test your optimisations with WebPageTest.org or Google’s PageSpeed.
- Use a Content Delivery Network
Caching your website content will help it load faster at the user’s end. It saves a copy of frequently requested content from your website and serves it instead of going back to the server every time. This reduces page load times. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) goes one step further and replicates your website data on a global network of servers. So whenever a user request comes in, it checks the user’s geographical locations and serves their request from the nearest server.
These optimisations, over and above VPS’s inherent speed, will raise your site’s performance. These are easy to implement. Try these today and experience the difference.
