If you are Digital Ocean user and looking ways to optimize your website for great speed and proper traffic management, this one is for you. We know that Digital Ocean has attractive prices and awesome services. In this article, we are not going to talk about any plans or features of Digital Ocean. I presume that you have a VPS with Digital Ocean and an active website installed in it. Here we will discuss the methods which can help you to optimize your website so that it can handle a good amount of real-time traffic! Increase real-time user of Digital Ocean with these steps. Have a look.
Basically, we are going to share some important ideas which you can apply to improve the speed and traffic management. Links to the full tutorial will be given in each of the methods. This requires technical knowledge about Linux and servers. If you are not well versed with these technologies, please do not change any settings. Ask your server administrator to optimize it. If you can do by your own then go ahead and try these stuff!
Increase Real-Time users on Digital Ocean VPS
Let us see various methods to increase the productivity of the Digital Ocean Servers.
Use Varnish Server (Reverse Proxy)
This is very important if you want any noticeable change in your website performance. Varnish is the reverse proxy server. It can cache your whole WordPress website in simple HTML files. After caching, it will serve HTML pages to users and it won’t pass the request to the actual Apache server. If you are using Nginx and Apache both, you can also use Varnish. In this case, you can set port 80 to Varnish and transfer the control to Nginx and at last it will be redirected to Apache if resource not available. In this, we can achieve a great optimization.
Procedure: Install Varnish with Apache on Ubuntu 12.04
Use W3Cache Plugin
It works exactly same as the Varnish server, but this will work under the WordPress CMS as it is a plugin. It will minify and generate simple HTML pages from dynamic WordPress. It can also cache database data and it can use accordingly. The combination of varnish and this plugin will get to maximum results. Install W3Cache Plugin in your WordPress site.
Allocate Swap Memory for MySQL
When you get lots of traffic on your website, it is possible that your MySQL server will be stopped after some time due to low memory. MySQL needs some free memory in the RAM to perform better during heavy traffic. If you are facing this problem, you have to create a swap memory in your SSD which can be utilized by MySQL and then it can handle high traffic easily. It’s little complicated to do as it affects other servers on the disk. Please make sure you do this with care.
Procedure: Add Swap file on Ubuntu
Optimize Images, Java Scripts, CSS Files
Make sure that your images are well compressed before using. It will be easier to retrieve from the server. Also, minify all Java Scripts and CSS files. This can help a lot and it can also reduce cache size. If you are thinking to deploy your website on $5 plan and expecting high traffic, then you have to keep your templates simple. Also, avoid using server-side scripting much.
Use CDN
If you want to use CDN for more speed then you can use the Cloud Flare, Incapsula etc. Make sure that all your setting and network configurations are perfect to avoid any unexpected downtime.
Upgrade Digital Ocean Resources
Digital Ocean offers great flexibility in plans. You can upgrade it easily with just 15-30 seconds of downtime. If you are facing very heavy traffic in particular day or hour then just increase your Digital Ocean droplet’s resources and it can handle it! After some time when you feel there is no excessive traffic, you can simply downgrade again. Digital Ocean charges for hours. So it will be cheapest and best way to tackle this problem.
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So these are some tips with appropriate links to optimize the Digital Ocean servers. Hope you got an idea about this. If you know more please share your tips in the comment box below.
Happy Earning!