Each blogger is much concerned about his or her content integrity and any data loss becomes a real nightmare. The most embarrassing thing that can happen is when the blogger kills his own content by accident or by mistake when performing a manual transfer, for instance.

The Internet is actually full of various articles on how to transfer WordPress blogs, but when we came around the need to move our own blog to a different location, we had to do it in a slightly different way. This was mostly connected with the peculiarities of the initial setup of our blog, but we believe we are not the only ones who might encounter same problems. Additionally, not all the articles have all important details mentioned. Therefore, we decided to share some experience in manual WordPress blog transferring – SiteValley.com version, so to say.

Common Peculiarities of Manual Blog Transfer

Manual transfer of the blog usually implies separate moving of the content and the databases and also the paths changing (mostly concerns the URLs). Such transfers are actually not recommended for any software since they may corrupt the structure of the website. If there’s a possibility to transfer the entire hosting account – it’s always better to use this exact option. However, manual transfers may be needed when:

1. a blog is hosted on an addon domain under some account and you need to have this domain and its content to be transferred to a standalone hosting account (with no domain change);
2. a blog is a part of some website and you need to move it to a separate domain (e.g. you want to move mywebsite.com/blog to myblog.com);
3. a blog was setup as a test instance and needs to be moved to the root folder of the hosted domain or vice versa (e.g. the content of mywebsite.com/testblog needs to be moved to mywebsite.com).

There may be several other reasons and variations, but the main idea is that you cannot transfer the entire account – you only need the content of that specific domain to be moved to another location. And you need it to work properly after the transfer, so keep reading.

File Backing-up, Transferring and Restoration

This is actually one of the easiest things, since everything you have to do is backup the entire WordPress folder and FTP it to the target folder. FTP is the keyword for transfers to remote hosts here, since this method is superior to file manager transferring method. Thus, you need to make sure that you have FTP access to both source and target accounts and that your FTP client is configured in an appropriate way. Backing-up process (actually, simple archive creation) can be performed via the file manager in your control panel, but if you have SSH access to your account it is advisable to backup your content using the following command:

tar –czvf wpbackup.tar.gz /home/%username%/public_html/%current_wp_folder%

Actually, having SSH access to the target server as well, you can use SCP file transfer method instead of FTP. Unlike FTP, SCP (secure copy) allows to exchange files between remote hosts directly. This saves a lot of time since you won’t have to download your files backup to your local machine first and only then upload it to the destination host. SCP command has a lot of options and therefore – syntax peculiarities. The simplest way to use it is to upload a file from the source server to the target server:

[%user%@%source_server%] scp -P %target_server_SHH_Port% wpbackup.tar.gz %user%@%target_server_IP%: (you may put a target folder path optionally, e.g.: %user%@%target_server_IP%:public_html)

This will deliver your backup file right to the home folder of your account on the destination server – the target folder value may differ upon your needs. After that you may simply extract your data using either control panel file manager or the “tar” command with different syntax:

tar –xzf wpbackup.tar.gz (use –C to specify the folder, without this parameter the archive will get extracted into the current folder)

Well, we seem to have coped with the data transfer. But that’s not all. We now need to take care of database transfer, too.

Database transfer

Database transfer differs from simple data transfer on all stages. First of all you don’t have direct access to database files due to user restrictions, that’s why you can back it up only by control panel means. Regardless of the control panel in use, you can create a backup of any single database you may need. To find which database contains your WordPress blog information – open the wp-config.php file. The very third line is going to tell you everything:

<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘%current_database_name%’);    // The name of the database

Since user restrictions disable you from leaving the backup on the server, you can only download it to your local machine. This may be somewhat inconvenient during inter-server transfers (e.g. in case you move your blog to a different account on the same server) but there’s not much to do about it. In the third case – inter-account transfer – you don’t need to make any of those steps at all.

The second step is restoration. In your control panel you can find either general backup restoration or specifically MySQL dump restoration options. You should choose none of the above though. The thing is that account restrictions and corresponding control panel settings may not let this operation be executed correctly because of the database username change. Thus, it is better to use phpMyAdmin for those purposes.

First things first – we need to have a database created. Once you do it, you need to create a user and assign it to the new DB. Now we have a database and its user with the username, identical with the one of our control panel account. This is important since it excludes any risk of conflicts.

Transferring WordPress Database

The next thing we do is import our database by phpMyAdmin means to the existing ones. As far as you can see, all tables and their settings are safe and sound but now they are fetched from a different database. The last task to resolve here is to “teach” your WordPress how to “communicate” with that database. Using a built-in file manager editor we open the “wp-config.php” file and make such options as

<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘%new_database_name%’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘%new_database_user%’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘%new_database_pass%’); // …and password

have the needed values now.

Post Transfer Fixes

After transferring WordPress blog to new host you need to make sure everything is going to work correctly. If you handled a transfer with no domain and blog directory change you can omit this step. However, it is always better to double check. Owing to the user friendly advanced WP admin interface many of those fixes can be done at your WP-admin panel, but if your website URL has been changed, you will need to make some changes in phpMyAdmin first.

Fixing Values in phpMyAdmin

Changing the blog URL part is the easiest task that enables you to make all other fixes from the admin interface. Just choose the wp_options table (its prefix may differ, but the “_options” postfix will be there anyway) and find the first option “siteurl”. Once you change this one, don’t haste to leave – we need to have the “home” option changed to. Its option id is usually within the range of 30-40, so you might need to check the second page. Browser search works fine in phpMyAdmin, so feel free to use it. After that you can login to myblog.com/wp-login.php to finalize the transfer – to check or edit upload path for instance.

Fixing Values in WP-admin

Some More Tips

Looks like the main critical points have been covered, so wherever you might need to transfer your WordPress to new server or simply move it to a different location, you now have a guide for your particular situation. Here are some useful notes more:

1. The more standard your WP installation is, the less problems you are likely to encounter after the transfer.
2. If you are moving your blog to a different server, take care of the domain nameservers
3. If your WP administrator’s or users’ emails are hosted on your website domain, don’t forget to backup your email, too.

The idea of this guide is to let everyone know how to transfer WordPress blog easily with no third party assistance. However, the main and the final tip here is: don’t hesitate to contact your technical support for any reasons. Data safety and integrity is way too important to risk.

We have already published several articles regarding WordPress. Those were mostly dedicated to the use of this popular blogging script and you might have noticed that while evaluating its capabilities, we mentioned VPS servers as a desired WordPress hosting platform. Although a virtual server is the most recommended hosting solution for a WP blog, it is understandable that many users would like to find a more affordable hosting ground to run their blogs on. Today we are going to reveal the main peculiarities of shared web hosting services use in terms of WordPress blog deployment and deliver some friendly tips.

Part 1: Choosing Your Shared Web Hosting Provider If you are interested in having your WordPress blog hosted on a shared server, you need to make sure your hosting provider is an expert in this business. Since the most popular problem with WP blogs on shared servers is connected with resource usage, you should choose a hosting company, which has the least overcrowded servers. In many cases a WordPress blog works fine within its so-called fair share of server CPU and RAM. However, if the server is overcrowded – for instance due to the overselling strategy applied by the hosting company – you may have your account suspended for being “abusive”, when it is actually not. Thus, if you see that your potential provider offers shared hosting with enormous disk space and bandwidth quotas – be sure, they oversell, so there is a risk of their hosting servers being way too overcrowded.

Look Into Web Hosting With No Fixed Quotas

Being best does not always mean being expensive. Currently there are many hosting providers, offering web hosting with unlimited traffic and even unlimited disk space for a very affordable price. And believe me, what they are doing is not overselling – on the contrary – such providers offer shared web hosting solutions, which do not limit their users on any resources strictly and give enough space – on certain conditions, of course. Those conditions usually imply percentage limits, which are clearly stated in clauses of company’s Terms of Usage or Acceptable Use Policy. Therefore, on the one hand you are getting as much space and resources as you need, while on the other hand your account is safe from being suspended, unless you exceed the set limits.

Use Ready-Made or Preinstalled Solutions

When starting a personal blog, many users do not consider shared hosting as a solution to use. Most of them think they can get a free account at blog hosting service and resolve such issues as domain registration or account management. This is not so, of course. First of all, if you are interested in attracting traffic and expanding your blog – you need to have your own domain and a separate account which would let you manage local settings (PHP settings, MySQL databases, etc). Additionally, having a personal hosting account you can setup email under your domain – that would improve the authority of your site.

For those, who consider account administration a hard and tricky thing – great news will be that since many years ago all shared hosting accounts are managed via user-end control panels, which are usually user friendly and easy to comprehend. Same goes for software management and installation – the majority of web hosting providers offers automated script installers (e.g. Installtron or Fantastico De Luxe) along with their hosting accounts. Those installers are built into a control panel and allow to setup, manage, update and remove any software, initially supported by the host.

Using Installatron or Fantastico web hosting you are not just simplifying the process of script management. When you let the auto installer setup or update your software you are set free from such problems as incorrect script and requests processing, which may cause excessive resource usage and further suspension of your account. Some providers of shared web hosting services offer even more – they sell accounts with already preinstalled software, including preinstalled WP blogs. Such solutions do guarantee you that you are not going to experience any resource usage issues on conditions of moderate resource usage (initial setup with a minimum of plug-ins) and average visitor rate of about 500 users a day (the figure is approximate and may vary depending on server hardware specification, number of accounts hosted, volume of content, etc.).

Part 2: Adjusting Your Account to Be The Best Blog Host

Though a shared server for web hosting may somehow limit your blogging capabilities, there are still options available. On the one hand those options let you tune your blog so that a problem of excessive resource usage would not emerge; on the other hand – the adjustment advice below can help you use all functions of your blog within the strict shared server limits.

Disable The Unnecessary Plug-ins

WordPress plug-ins certainly enhance the work of the blog. Some of them however, are very resource intensive, thus you need to be very careful while using them – especially those which work on principles of recursion or live tracking. Different caching modules and SEO tools may significantly increase the server resource usage rates and cause much inconvenience. Thus, if you are trying some plug-in out, but are not going to use it constantly or within some time period – you can temporarily disable it and lessen the load on the server.

Keep Your Software Updated and Optimized

Both WordPress and its modules are constantly updated by the WordPress developers team. Those updates do not only include security patches but also usually contain fixed code, which means that the newer version is more stable and less resource intensive than the previous one. Apart from this “in-script” optimization, you should also take care of the optimization of your environment; php.ini file adjustment – usually available on any shared server – is what to look into. If you are not sure about doing this on your own, you can always contact a webmaster. Though such solution may seem to be costly, the money you spend once on the optimization will save the money on the upgrade for a longer period of time.

Keep It Clean

The database load issues take place very frequently on shared server. Thus, unused articles drafts and disapproved or spam comments should be moderated, since their storing increases the database size and seriously slowdown the work of your WP blog. Of course you may keep some of those (except for spam, I believe), but you should definitely do some clean up. That shouldn’t be done too often, but monthly auditing of your blog dashboard would significantly assist you with its administration and load management.

Take Care of the Content Size

When you upload some files, you need to make sure they are as compact as possible. This mostly concerns images. You anyway do not post all of them full-size – you use thumbnails instead, therefore it may be reasonable to resize your images before having them actually uploaded to your blog. Such measure does save lots of space in the databases making them easier to process. If the image is not unique – it is recommended to fetch it from a URL.

Conclusions

If you need a budget hosting solution for your personal or small company WordPress blog, it really is advisable to have a look at a shared hosting plan. Despite the limitations, quality shared hosting is going to deliver you a stable affordable ground for your WP software. Since many hosting providers offer WordPress script either along with an autoinstaller or already preinstalled (like Sitevalley.com does), you are going to be set free from many setup and management troubles. Thus, your sole task is to take care of your blog staying updated and optimized during its further use. Those conditions are going to guarantee you an easy and non-problem use of your WordPress software for a long time.

Blogging for Promotion. Image Source: flickr.com

Nowadays any serious company aimed at constant growth and concerned with its reputation is being actively promoted in social media. B2C relations and behavior models have changed, so now the companies do not just inform their users – they communicate with them, expecting feedbacks, alternatives, suggestions, etc. Those relations become more and more bilateral; therefore it is very important to work out a social media strategy.

First of all, a company should use social media as a mean of communication with its customers. It is very important, since the more customers share their ideas and suggestions, the better the service will be. Another point is inter-customer communication which is important for community building. Finally, building brand advocates around a company will definitely attract those, who may become customers later.

Social media strategy usually involves constant and active communication with customers within social networks. Twitter and Facebook are the most popular ones. Another means are newsletter delivery and launch of the corporate forum on community building purposes. Additionally, if a company sells some goods, the social media marketers may create a dedicated YouTube channel to release videos with their products commercials, tests and how-to’s, etc.

Today we are going to talk specifically about blogging as a means of social media promotion.

Start your own blog

Start Your Own Blog. Image Source: kimandscotts.wordpress.com

A corporate blog is one of the most powerful communication channels. Such blogs are used in order to create some buzz around the company. Those blogs gather and share information related to business they are doing and serves as a company newsfeed. Corporate blogs may be not very strict and official as we are all human and their authors are trying to tell that, posting some funny articles or releasing reports from the latest party. This works quite well for relationship building. However, the main objective of the corporate blogger is to make the blog interesting and attractive for business people. Interesting ideas are supposed to improve brand loyalty and bring in new customers or partners.

Thus, if your company has its website, you need to have a blog started under it. Share your news and ideas, post your views and receive comments to them – all this will increase the interest in your project. In order to speak and to be heard, and to gain interest of not only your current customers but also of the occasional visitors, you need to get blogging software and install it. The most recommended free blogging software is WordPress, as it has plenty of useful options and can be enhanced with numerous plug-ins. You can get WordPress installation here.

Take Care of the Content

Once you set up your own blog, you need to fill it with content and constantly update it. The thing you need to keep in mind is that the content needs to be of good quality, so it is better to publish a limited number of unique well-written posts, rather than posting low-quality content in bulk. A blog mostly needs to be updated by a social media person; however, the involvement of the entire team of the project would be very useful, as far as different people have expertise in different fields and some knowledge to share. As mentioned above, a blog shouldn’t be too official, so apart from publishing company news and reviews, press-releases and research reports you may also put some fun into it.

Have Your Blog Linked

Get it Linked! Image Source: flickr.com

If you want your blog to bring more traffic and more people, interested in your services or products, you need to obtain external links. Those can bring customers to your website or your Twitter or Facebook corporate account, whatever – but they need to work. Inter-linking – provision of internal links is essential, too. Say, someone finds a certain article from your blog on Google. He or she follows it, but once they finish with reading, they usually don’t browse along the entire blog – no “Home” or “Older Entries” clicks are made, so the page per visit rate stays at “1”. You may improve this situation by linking some of the keywords to other articles on the topic, you have published.

Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging. Image Source: flickr.com

Having a corporate blog helps to forward its visitors to your company site. Of course, you will ask how to get traffic to your blog! Here is the solution – you need to find some blogs, accepting guest posts and which content would be relevant to your service and business you run. Then you can start posting articles there and getting them back-linked to your blog or to your website directly. Those posts help you establishing yourself as an expert in a certain niche and a guest blog owner get quality content to his or her blog for free. Of course, those posts should be quality as well, so it is advisable to get familiarized with post submission conditions and accepted topics at every certain website. If you want your blog to become popular – mark guest blogging as another objective in your social media marketing plan.

Summary

Blogging becomes more and more popular. A well-organized, frequently updated blog with wide targeted audience can become a very powerful social media tool. Whatever your company deals with, you should anyway have something to say – so say it! Be active and self-confident and make the others feel, you are. Share your experience, thoughts, and ideas and see people leaving comments on the matter, discussing them and involving other people into it. This is the way social media marketing works.

Scripts Resource Intensity

Nowadays having a personal website is as common as having a cell phone. Some people use cell phones for just giving and receiving calls and messages and some cannot simply imagine their mobile telephony device without a camera, an MP3-player and so on. It really is likewise about the websites: some website owners use their hosting accounts to bring up pages on the web and use email at their own domain. The others want their websites to be an ultimate public project, which would support many options starting from integration with social networks and ending with, but not limited to provision of downloadable content.

The way the sites are built is a question of demand, of course. But this question raises another one in turn – a question of approach. Many website owners start with shared hosting but then face with the problem of resource overuse, as their projects keep developing. And that’s where the question of approach becomes essential – those who take such issues seriously usually decide to upgrade in order to avoid temporary suspension due to excessive resource usage.

Of course, the website owner may not always realize the influence of his/her particular account on the entire server. On the other hand, server administrators are always glad to assist with the resolution of the problem. Those suspensions are mostly a preventive measure, which doesn’t let the entire server go down. For example, our team is always open for a dialogue and we co-operate with our Customers to find out the way to get the issue resolved. However, if it is definitely not about some particular script or module which is enough to be disabled to let the account keep working on the shared server – an upgrade is the next step.

VPS as a Hosting Ground for Resource Intensive Websites

Several years earlier the word “upgrade” would definitely mean a setup of a dedicated server, which would be tens times more expensive, than a shared hosting plan you used to have. Modern technology, however, has introduced a more liberal solution – Virtual Private Server (VPS). Those virtual servers are containers, created by means of virtualization software on physical servers. Current platforms allow a VPS web hosting user to obtain almost the same level of performance as the server-carrier provides, which means that a user can get a dedicated server, though a virtualized one, for a significantly cheaper price.

A virtual server has the following key advantages, which are to be considered during the upgrade:

1. Isolation – none of several virtual servers on the carrier influences each other. No limitations are set.
2. Full root environment – the user is provided with the maximal administration privileges.
3. No hardware dependencies – server does not require file system checks and RAID array rebuilds after reboot.

As you can see, a VPS resolves the main concern of a shared hosting account user – mutual user dependency. The thing is that shared servers have such strict limitations primarily due to the problem of even resource distribution, i.e. those limits create fair equal conditions, which let any user run his/her applications without abusing the other accounts. This equality is also guaranteed on a server software level – all major services, like Apache, MySQL and PHP are configured in a standard way and can be slightly tuned up only on a user level by means of local configuration files (e.g. .htaccess, php.ini, etc.).

VPS web hosting, however, provides each user with isolated environment. This means, that there is no one to share resources with, i.e. there are no limits and that any server software may be tuned up according to the peculiarities of the hosted script/application.

Optimizing your WordPress Blog Performance

There are many scripts which require certain tune up. The more tasks a script is to carry our, the finer the tune up should be. As an example we take WordPress blogging tool, which is known for its resource usage peculiarities and a wide range of available plug-ins.

Surely, WordPress is one of the greatest scripts on the Web. This blog tool lets you create a nice and usable website by means of a user-friendly easy-to-comprehend interface. Its basic configuration is fine to be hosted on a shared hosting server and we offer a special plan Blog Hosting with WordPress preinstalled to those, who would like to start their own blog. Still, this platform is a rather resource intensive one, so depending on your goal and means of project realization, you may need to have your account upgraded.

Of course, it is essential to find out, what exactly makes WP resource intensive. Primarily it is the way, it works with the databases. Below you can find an example of a MySQL request created by one user, who is viewing one WordPress page:

3 Query       SELECT option_name, option_value FROM wp_options WHERE autoload = ‘yes’
3 Query       SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘rewrite_rules’ LIMIT 1
3 Query       SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS  wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts  WHERE 1=1  AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘post’ AND (wp_posts.post_status = ‘publish’)  ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 0, 10
3 Query       SELECT FOUND_ROWS()
3 Query       SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN (‘category’, ‘post_tag’) AND tr.object_id IN (10) ORDER BY t.name ASC
3 Query       SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (10)
3 Query       SELECT * FROM wp_posts  WHERE (post_type = ‘page’ AND post_status = ‘publish’)     ORDER BY menu_order ASC
3 Query       SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘page_for_posts’ LIMIT 1
3 Query       SELECT * FROM wp_users WHERE ID = 1 LIMIT 1
3 Query       SELECT meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_usermeta WHERE user_id = 1
3 Query       SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 10 AND comment_approved = ’1′ ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC
3 Query       SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 10 AND comment_approved = ’1′ ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC
3 Query       SELECT * FROM wp_posts  WHERE (post_type = ‘page’ AND post_status = ‘publish’)     ORDER BY menu_order, post_title ASC
3 Query       SELECT t.*, tt.* FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON t.term_id = tt.term_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN (‘category’)  ORDER BY t.name ASC
3 Query       SELECT wp_comments.* FROM wp_comments JOIN wp_posts ON wp_posts.ID = wp_comments.comment_post_ID WHERE comment_approved = ’1′ AND post_status = ‘publish’ ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 15
3 Query       SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 12 AND comment_parent = 0 AND comment_approved = ’1′ AND comment_date_gmt < ’2010-02-22 16:54:11′
3 Query       SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 12 AND comment_parent = 0 AND comment_approved = ’1′ AND comment_date_gmt < ’2010-02-22 14:25:24′
3 Query       SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 12 AND comment_parent = 0 AND comment_approved = ’1′ AND comment_date_gmt < ’2010-02-08 18:51:45′
3 Query       SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 12 AND comment_parent = 0 AND comment_approved = ’1′ AND comment_date_gmt < ’2010-01-29 02:58:05′
3 Query       SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 12 AND comment_parent = 0 AND comment_approved = ’1′ AND comment_date_gmt < ’2010-01-29 00:23:01′
3 Query       SELECT YEAR(min(post_date_gmt)) AS firstyear, YEAR(max(post_date_gmt)) AS lastyear FROM wp_posts WHERE post_date_gmt > 1970
3 Quit

MySQL queries of the *SELECT type are one of the most abusive as they go over all the databases to find the needed value. This results into aggressive disk subsystem and CPU usage. By the way, the log above was for a simple WordPress page, which had no add-ons or plug-ins, so you can imagine, what it is going to be, if WordPress is run full-throttle.

It is absolutely logical to search a way for optimization of such queries, as far as the fewer queries are produced, the more free CPU time is left for other server services. That’s what caching is used for. All you need is to edit your wp-config.php file by adding the following two lines there:

// Enable the WordPress Object Cache:
define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);

But this is minor SQL optimization. Another reason for WordPress issues is webserver overload, caused by simultaneous http requests. WP does not offer any other built-in caching tools and the one –WP Super Cache, which is available as a plug-in – is rather resource intensive, so it is allowed for use on VPS and dedicated servers only (AUP, p. 10.1). WP Super Cache is a static caching plug-in, which generates html files that are served directly by Apache webserver without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. This plug-in is one of the means to increase your WordPress blog performance significantly.

Still, this is not all what you can do for webserver optimization. Now you should edit your Apache configuration file (full path: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf) as follows:

Note: Before you proceed with file editing, make sure you backed-up your configuration file.

# Timeout and Keepalive
Timeout 30
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 6

#Maximum Client Connections
&lt;IfModule prefork.c&gt;
StartServers       8
MinSpareServers    5
MaxSpareServers   20
ServerLimit      512
MaxClients       512
MaxRequestsPerChild  4000
&lt;/IfModule&gt;

Note: MaxRequestsPerChild parameter is a tricky one, so 4000 is not the fixed value, you may try a range from 1000 to 4000 to see, which configuration is better and leave it.
Note: #Maximum Client Connections may be not available in the configuration file, if “prefork” Apache module is not configured (if not, there’s a “worker mpm” module installed instead).

Once the file is edited, restart Apache with the following command: /etc/init.d/httpd restart.
Additionally you may consult more online guides on disabling those Apache modules, you are not using.
Such modules take CPU time and RAM to get loaded and then simply do nothing, while you can comment them out in the configuration file.

Another service to edit is PHP. Find a global php.ini file (should be located there: /usr/local/lib/php.ini) and copy it to the root folder of your WordPress. Open it for editing to set the following parameters:

;*Turn off for performance
register_globals = Off
register_long_arrays = Off
register_argc_argv = Off
magic_quotes_gpc = Off
magic_quotes_runtime = Off
magic_quotes_sybase = Off
;*Allow PHP to accept large data
post_max_size = 8M
file_uploads = On
upload_max_filesize = 8M

Conclusion

We really hope you find these tips useful. Those are not the only ones, of course, so you can find many other ways of WordPress optimization, which may come in handy. It is still advisable to consult your technical support team before making any changes to the essential services on your server and of course, do not forget to backup your initial configuration files.

In this post I would like to share some of the great WordPress plugins available today free of charge. As you probably know, there are thousands of plugins available today. It can be a tough goal to select the ones that not only perform the required actions, but also are stable and secure. In order to provide you with some kind of a starting point I have conducted a search for essential WordPress plugins. This is a sort of a recommendation review aimed at introducing available capabilities and helping you choose what suits you best.

I tried to introduce some order into the numerous plugins functionality descriptions and came up with the following purpose classification matrix:

Plugin purpose classification matrix

I placed the useful plugins into groups according to this matrix. So let’s take a closer look…

Back-end oriented plugins

Tasks implemented by back-end oriented plugins

These tools are aimed at making management of your WordPress as pleasant and easy as possible (the descriptions were taken from the official plugin pages at wordpress.org). These plugins help you do the boring operations quickly and in bulk quantities.

HeadSpace2 SEO – HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your blog. Visit the HeadSpace page for a video demonstration.

WP-DBManager – Allows you to optimize, repair , backup, restore database, as well as to delete backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

TinyMCE Advanced – This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE (the WordPress WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet editor): Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. All of the above add a huge amount of functionality to the process of writing and editing your posts.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu – Allows you to view the second level menus by simply hovering over them with a mouse. Rationalizers  and power users will love it : all admin links are available in a neat horizontal CSS driven drop down menu. No need to click on “Manage” then “Pages” to edit pages, you can navigate between any administration pages with just a single action.

Maintenance Mode Plugin – Adds a splash page to your blog which lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Visitors will see a message like “Maintenance Mode – SITE is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Please try back in 60 minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Theme Test Drive – This plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. It happens completely transparent and they will not even notice you run a different theme for yourself. Best part is you can even set the testing theme options (if it has them) in the Admin panel while you are testing the theme.

Front-end oriented plugins

Tasks implemented through plugins for front-end customization

Helping your readers enjoy the stuff they see and do on your blog can eventually not only drive the old visitors back to check out more new posts, but also attract new ones. Makes the communication process useful and comfortable by correctly adjusting the commenting options and eliminating spam from your blog, which can lead to community establishment on your website. The plugins listed below can help you do these things:

WP Greet Box – This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Having these targeted suggestions will help your blog increase exposure, loyal readership, and reader interaction.

WordPress Thread Comment – This Plugin is an enhancement for WordPress’s comment function. It enables users to reply to an existing comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested. This helps keeping the comments organized and transparent to all participants, taking the communication on your blog to the next level.

Top Commentators Widget – As the name suggests itself, this widget allows you to display your top commentators in the sitebar. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin at Personal Financial Advice, this widget is easier to manage via the control form (no need to edit the PHP file); additional options are also available to make it more flexible. Read the FAQ section on how to customize it and take a look at the screen shot to see the control form for customizing the Top Commentators Widget.

Akismet –This one checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

WP-reCAPTCHA – is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University which uses CAPTCHAs in a genius way. Instead of randomly generating useless characters, which irritate your visitors, and risking the possibility that spammers will eventually write sophisticated spam bots which use OCR libraries to read the characters, reCAPTCHA uses a different approach. While the world is in the process of digitizing books, sometimes certain words cannot be read. reCAPTCHA uses a combination of these words, further distorts them, and then constructs a CAPTCHA image. After a certain percentage of users solve the ‘unknown’ word the same way it is assumed that it is the correct spelling of the word. This helps digitize books, giving users a reason to solve reCAPTCHA forms. Because the industry level scanners and OCR software which are used to digitize the books can’t read the words with which the CAPTCHAs are constructed, it is safe to assume that in-house spam-bot OCR techniques will not be able to bypass the CAPTCHA either.

NextGEN Gallery – This is a fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. This plugin incorporates really good design with simple and easy administration back-end. Using this plugin you can effectively manage multiple photos, galleries and albums.

cbnet Different Posts Per Page – This plugin will allow you to modify the number of posts shown on your homepage, archive (category, date, author, etc.), search pages and feeds. You can even set the order of posts by ascending or descending order. Also, you can set different number of posts for specific category.

Visitors oriented plugins

Tasks implemented through plugins for managing visitors related functions

This section is dedicated to the list of plugins that have to do with the visitors directly. Language tools and Advertising tools are aimed at impacting the customer. Statistics plugin is aimed at counting the number of visitors and perform other web metrics related tasks. So here is the list:

Global Translator – amazing plugin that automatically translates your blog into the following 41 different languages: Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Albanian, Estonian, Galician,Maltese,Thai,Turkish,Hungarian. The number of available translations will depend on your blog language and the translation engine you choose to use. Of course the quality of such translation will not be perfect, but it will still let many people out there at least get tthe idea of what you are writing about.

Ultimate Google Analytics – Plugin to add Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your web blog without making any changes to your template. The plugin can also adds tracking to outbound links, downloads from your own site and mailto: links. The plugin is highly configurable. Read trough the list of features below to get a feeling of what this plugin can do. You can enable and disable all features individually, although the default configuration will suffice for 90% of the users.

Advertising Manager – This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.

Outside resources oriented plugins

Integration with outside resources

The set of the following tools is intended to provide simple integration with the most popular social networks. The idea is to simplify the procedure of interconnecting the information provided on your twitter, Facebook and WP website. Why manually tell your Twitter followers about your post when this can be done automatically each time you post something new!

Sociable – This is a great promotion tool. Sociable plugin automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

Simple Facebook Connect – Simple Facebook Connect is a series of plugins that let you add any sort of Facebook connect functionality you like to a WordPress blog. This lets you have an integrated site without a lot of coding, and still letting you customize it exactly the way you’d like to. First, you activate and set up the base plugin, which makes your site have basic Facebook Connect functionality. Then, each of the add-on plugins will let you add small pieces of specific Facebook-related functionality, one by one.

Twitter Tools – This is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

General recommendations

I would recommend installing and trying all of these plugins. Even if the plugin doesn’t meet your exact requirements, you can always continue the search. Here are a few plugin related posts you can check out for more plugins:

• http://line25.com/articles/15-essential-wordpress-plugins-for-aspiring-designers
• http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/12/best-wordpress-plugins-for-power-blogging/
• http://www.tricksdaddy.com/2009/05/top-11-comment-plugins-to-make-your-wordpress-blog-more-user-friendly.html
• http://www.smashingapps.com/2009/01/17/17-really-useful-wordpress-plugins-that-probably-are-essential.html

Also, please keep in mind that it is highly recommended to install only those plugins that are listed at the WordPress official plugin directory. Plugins coming from elsewhere may pose security and stability threats to your WP. And of course, always remember to backup prior to performing significant changes to your WP site.

If you do not yet have a WordPress hosting account yet, you might want to check out affordable, yet extremely flexible plan at Sitevalley.com. The plan comes with pre-installed WP so that you can start blogging without any installation complications.

Good luck with experimenting.

Backups as precautions against data loss.

Every hosting account holder must understand the importance of backups. They play the same role in information technology, a car insurance plays in everyday life. Backups help you in case of unexpected issues with content on your account. Forums, blogs and similar projects take a lot of time to develop, but one serious spontaneous error in the system can damage all your information or even make it vanish entirely. This can happen due to numerous reasons: hardware and software faults, to name a few. Take into consideration such widely spread activity as hacking, and you will realize the scale of existing menaces. As a matter of fact, any WordPress blog, which is not updated on time, can easily fall victim to such malicious activity . This is also true for any kind of web software. Last but not least, you can accidentally make errors in data of your blog yourself, and then you need a point to roll back to. Backups enable you to do just that.

One of the easiest ways to make sure you can recover after most content related disasters is to make backups of your account from time to time. In case you run a WordPress based blog, having a backup of entire account is not necessary. It is enough to simply have a couple of healthy database dumps, which contain all important information, including your posts. Since posts are the most important part of any blog, having them in reserve archives saves you a lot of work in case of emergency restoration.

MySQL database backup script

There are numerous backup plugins for WordPress, but the mechanisms used in them are not as secure and reliable as the method described below. I will try to explain a way to use cron jobs on your hosting account to perform back up of your WordPress database.

The cron is a special scheduling service independently run on the server. Let’s say we have a set of commands to be executed. In this case, using cron jobs commands can be scheduled for regular execution, requiring no attention from the user whatsoever. The process will be fully automated. Since cron is an independent service, it is more reliable and more efficient than the wordpress plugin scripts. There is a special section for configuring crons with the help of GUI in most hosting control panels.

The set of commands we want to be executed in the framework of backup procedure is relatively small. First of all, backup dump creation will be scheduled and compressed immediately after being made in order to conserve disk space. We will also apply the command to change the access permissions for this archive in order to decrease the possibility of it being stolen or damaged. We can configure backup to be written to the same file on the daily basis (the simplest solution), but this is not very convenient, as corruption of information can happen without you noticing it and then this corruption will be written over a healthy backup. We will make backups on the daily basis, but will write the information into different files. The date will be added to the name of the file, so that it is easier to identify files you need. Additionally, we will configure the cron to delete the backup files, which are over 7 days old, in order not to fill up the space on the account with backups.

The list of described commands needs to be stored in one file. This allows us to use just one task in cron daemon to execute several described commands. Files of this kind are called scripts. I will show what the content of the file can be on example of commands used on Sitevalley Blog hosting account. (Please note that some paths can differ for various operating systems, such as FreeBSD and Linux. The list of commands given here is for usage in FreeBSD OS installed on Sitevalley hosting servers. If you are not sure about correct paths/locations, it is better to consult your hosting administrators).

You can use any text editor to create the script file. It needs to have extension ‘.sh’. I named the file ‘wp-bps.sh’. The content of the script file should be the following (Please note: I take no responsibility for any data loss or corruption when using this script):

#!/bin/sh #This line shows the cron what utility should be used to execute the commands in this file.

# Username to access the MySQL server. In the line below substitute the ‘database_user_name’
#with the appropriate username for the database of your wordpress.

USERNAME=database_user_name

# Username to access the MySQL server. In the line below substitute the ‘database_password’
#with the appropriate password for the database of your wordpress.

PASSWORD=database_password

# Host name (or IP address) of MySQL server. Here simply leave the ‘localhost’.

DBHOST=localhost

# Name of the database to make the backup of. In the line below substitute the ‘database_name’
#with the appropriate name of your wordpress database.

DBNAME=database_name

# Backup directory location. In the line below substitute the ‘backup_directory’
#with the path to the directory where you want your backups stored.

#E.g. /usr/home/username/domains/myblog.com/public_html/wp-backups/

BACKUPDIR=”backup_directory”

#Specify the age of the backups that should be deleted.

#This is needed in order to avoid abusing the space on account with backups.

#(m=month; h=hours, m=minutes, s=seconds).

#Substitute the ‘backup_age’ with an appropriate value (e.g. 7d).

BPAGE=backup_age

#Location of mysqldump command. Here you need to substitute the ‘path_to_mysqldump’
#with the path to the location where the mysqldump command is situated.

#E.g. /usr/local/mysql-5.0.51a-freebsd7.0-i386/bin/

MYSQLDUMPLOC=”path_to_mysqldump”

#No changes needed below this line

PATH=$PATH:$MYSQLDUMPLOC;

DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d_%Hh%Mm`

mysqldump -u$USERNAME -p$PASSWORD $DBNAME | gzip > $BACKUPDIR/mysql_backup_$DATE.gz;

chmod 600 $BACKUPDIR/mysql_backup_$DATE.gz;

find $BACKUPDIR -type f -name “*.gz” -mtime +$BPAGE -exec rm -f {} \;

You need to make changes described on lines in blue color (you can download a file with this script here). If you are not sure about database_user_name, database_password and database_name you can check this information in the file ‘wp-config.php’ located in the folder where you installed your wordpress. You need to look for the following lines within this file (information in blue in the example):

^{// ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** //}

^{/** The name of the database for WordPress */}

^{define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘your database name here‘);}

^{/** MySQL database username */}

^{define(‘DB_USER’, ‘ your database user here ‘);}

^{/** MySQL database password */}

^{define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘ your database password here ‘);}

^{/** MySQL hostname */}

^{define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘ your MySQL hostname here ‘);}

When you are done editing your .sh file, you need to upload it to your hosting account. As soon as it is done, change its permissions to 600. This permission set will prevent other users on the server and your site visitors from accessing and editing this file, which is a reasonable security measure.

Now your script file is completely ready to be used with a cron. Go to your Direct Admin control panel (or any other admin panel). Follow the steps shown in figure 1 and 2 to configure the cron job (figures are applicable to DirectAdmin panel only).

Cron menu location in DA

Figure 1. Cronjobs menu

Description of parameters in Cronjob menu in DA

This is it, the cron job has been scheduled to regularly execute the backup script. You can download the backup files to your local PC or Mac using a regular FTP or SCP client. Even though the cron will work autonomously, it is still recommended to occasionally download copies to your local computer. I recommend doing this because we have configured the script to delete the backups which are over 7 days old.

Conclusions

Using cronjobs for backing up your wordpress databases is relatively easy, yet very reliable. Such backup script posses several advantages as compared to plugins, such as:

• The backups are performed under control of cron daemon, which is independent from WordPress or any other script.
• Such backing up approach can be used for any software, not only WordPress.
• The backup operation is done on behalf of a user. This allows applying strict restrictions on the access permissions for the backed up data (e.g. 600), thus securing the important content as well as login details.

Of course setting up such cronjob requires a little typing and research. But in general, it is easy enough for any beginner to implement. And unlike plugins the code is very clear and easy to understand and debug in case of issues.

We at Sitevalley hope this code will help making your hosting experience safer and more efficient.