So to deal with the possible future spikes in traffic, I’ve started testing out some ways of optimizing WordPress and the virtual private server I have hosted on RimuHosting.

So far, I’ve installed the Digg Defender and WP-Cache plugins for WordPress. Digg Defender sees traffic from digg.com and redirects it to an external cached version of the page on a free service called Coral Cache. Ricardo Galli, author of WP-Cache, describes his plugin as:

An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database.

Installation of the two plugins were pretty easy and I’m now looking into optimizing the server itself. I found this link:

Streamlining your webserver

The instructions are for Gentoo Linux, but it looks fairly adaptable to my installation Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I know, I know, nerd alert! I’m still a newbie to managing a web server, so I won’t pretend to know the best way to do this. At this point, it’s gonna be trying out new things and seeing if it works.

If gracious readers have any further advice, feel free to offer suggestions in the comments. Feedback, both negative and positive, are always welcomed.