Just writing to let you know that I’ve switched servers for this blog! I’ve been meaning to get this on to a faster server that I have control over for awhile, and I finally got around to doing it.
For those of you who are curious, this site is being served by WordPress Multisite, on a Sakura 2G VPS.
And because everyone likes talking about stacks:
Kidding.
MariaDB NGINX PHP WordPress That’s it!
Today, we just released the Varnish-ed site I posted about a few days ago. A few things to be careful about in your Varnish deployment (that I had originally overlooked):
Make sure you’re 301 redirecting traffic to your canonical name (http://www.example.com/example to http://example.com/example, or vice versa) Do this redirecting within Varnish! I had strange problems when applying this logic within Apache. If you insist on applying the redirection logic within Apache, you may run into a problem where the Varnish health-check “probes” will fail (and deem your backend “sick”, throwing 503 errors at everyone after the grace period has expired).
TL;DR: Scroll to the bottom for the attached VCL.
No, I’m not talking about the stuff you put on paint to make it last longer.
I’m talking about this amazing piece of software: https://www.varnish-cache.org/
Put simply, Varnish is a “reverse proxy” - a piece of software that goes between the main server and the client. Basically what it does is caches content, so PHP (or whatever backend you’re using) doesn’t need to run for every single request - this makes perfect sense with static content.