Category: Servers and Hosting

Securing ISPConfig Admin Panel the Easy Way

The latest ISPConfig hosting panel includes support for Let’s Encrypt free SSL certificates. This makes it easy to secure all domains added to the panel, but it doesn’t have an option to generate a cert for the actual control panel login.

Rather than manually installing and configuring a new cert through the command line, there is an easier option. Continue reading “Securing ISPConfig Admin Panel the Easy Way” ››

Using LetsEncrypt With Serverpilot

If you need to quickly set up a blank server or don’t have much experience with systems administration then you can’t really go wrong with serverpilot. The free plan covers everything you really need to set the server up and keep it updated but it has one large drawback in that you need to upgrade to a paid plan to install and manage free SSL certificates. Continue reading “Using LetsEncrypt With Serverpilot” ››

Permanently Redirect all URL’s to Lowercase

Ideally I like to keep all urls in lowercase, but there are a few things that can lead to your site being indexed with a mixture of upper and lower case characters, which in turn can lead to problems with search engines.

How can this happen? Well, for me it was playing around with Joomla’s sh404sef component and not checking the settings properly. By default it is set to use the case of category and article titles which resulted in some ugly /Joomla/Page-Title type urls. Whilst the component was installed it wasn’t a problem. After removing it (for many reasons) the problems started. When requesting the above url Joomla will serve the page /joomla/page-title and the url in the browser will remain as /Joomla/Page-Title.

If applications do this by default then it only takes a rival company to point several mixed-case links to your site to potentially cause a lot of problems.

Continue reading “Permanently Redirect all URL’s to Lowercase” ››

Find the Root Path to your Hosting

Sometimes you just need the root path, for whatever reason. If you can’t get it you can create a php file and include the following lines.

Continue reading “Find the Root Path to your Hosting” ››

Are CDN’s Always a Good Idea?

At first a content delivery network seems like a great idea, but is it possible that it can actually be detrimental to your sites speed? Lets find out.

Continue reading “Are CDN’s Always a Good Idea?” ››

Enable KeepAlive on Godaddy VPS

Another red warning light when running google page speed or yslow that is quite easy to sort out if you are running your own server.

First you need to know how to login through SSH as root user which you can do by reading this post.

And you need an editor installed to be able to edit the right file to enable the apache keepalive feature, which you can read about in this post.

(all links open in a new window so don’t be afraid!).

So here we go….

Continue reading “Enable KeepAlive on Godaddy VPS” ››

Set Expires Headers in .htaccess

Set Expires Headers in .htaccess to speed up page load times

If you use the firebug pagespeed addon or yslow you will be used to seeing the warning ‘Add Expires Headers’

This can be quite simple to fix by adding the following lines at the bottom of your .htaccess file.

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Speed up @fontface loading time

@fontface is a great tool for giving your site an individual look, the down-side is that on a standard site, the font is downloaded on each page view.

As the font can take a little time to download, the page text is loaded first and then the font is replaced once it has finished downloading which (especially on slow connections) leads to a flash of unformatted text (sometimes described as FOUT flash of unformatted text).

There are a few tutorials which explain how to stop the text displaying until the font has finished downloading, but I feel this is against the readers interests as ultimatley they are there to read the text, however it looks.

Continue reading “Speed up @fontface loading time” ››

301 Redirect Each Page of Site to New Domain Address

To redirect all pages from http://www.olddomain.com to http://www.newdomain.com in the domain root of your old domain create a .htaccess file and paste the following code, changing the domain name:

Continue reading “301 Redirect Each Page of Site to New Domain Address” ››

Compress Favicon with Htaccess

Add MIME type and Expires Header to Favicon

Add these lines to your .htaccess file to speed up favicon loading, as specified by the Yahoo Yslow documentation.

Continue reading “Compress Favicon with Htaccess” ››