Category: Server Management

Whether you’ve previously heard of uptime monitoring or not, it’s something any website owner needs to explore.

Assuming you’re a website owner, you’ll almost certainly have found yourself in a situation where you’ve had to rush to update your site and address a bug that needed to be fixed ASAP.

No matter how much testing you carry out during development, you can’t always foresee every potential problem, and discovering an ominous alert that informs you your website is offline is a sure way to get the heart pumping and the panic rising!

And that’s exactly why uptime monitoring is something to consider very seriously.

Unexpected situations can be easily avoided using automatic website uptime monitoring – a practice that helps to ensure a smooth user experience by routinely checking a website’s performance.

We have previously published several popular articles explaining how to:

• Use Datadog synthetic monitoring to test and optimize your web services
• Monitor RunCloud server using Dynatrace
• Monitor your web app’s RAM & CPU usage with Netdata
• Install & configure New Relic monitoring on RunCloud
• How UptimeRobot can save your website from downtime disasters

In this post, we will discuss the necessity of Uptime Monitoring and also take a look at some popular tools that will help measure your website’s uptime.

Uptime Monitoring: What Is it?

Uptime monitoring is the process of checking your website for downtime, and taking remedial or preventative action if necessary. It is done using software that runs in the background and verifies that your website is operating correctly.

Usually, two kinds of uptime monitoring tools exist – active and passive:

• Passive monitoring uses a third-party tool to determine whether your website is accessible from external networks such as Google or Yahoo for detecting downtime.
• Active monitors ping your server every 30 seconds continuously in search of any indications of a possible outage.

Any downtime can potentially cost you valuable customers, and of course, income. It can seriously impact your brand’s reputation too, which is why it’s critical to keep a close eye on the status of your website to allow you to take speedy action if necessary.

How is Uptime Measured?

The period of time during which a system is operational and free of any major bugs or glitches is called uptime. Any system that functions efficiently and doesn’t require maintenance or administrative support will have a lengthy uptime.

Uptime is expressed as a percentage, often advertised by hosting providers as something like 97.79% uptime. In essence, a 100% uptime indicates that your website was operational 100% of the time, or 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.However, 100% uptime exists only in fantasies; even the biggest of tech companies, such as Cloudflare only ever guarantees 99.999999999% uptime. Realistically, anything in the high 90s range is good enough for most small businesses. 

How Does Uptime Monitoring Work?

When we talk about uptime monitoring, we’re usually talking about active monitoring which works by sending automated HTTP queries to a certain URL on a predetermined frequency – and waiting for the desired result.

Usually, HTTP GET requests are used for this, although it is possible to use other types of HTTP requests for monitoring other features and APIs, depending on the needs of the user. The predefined frequency of these checks can vary from every second for mission critical business services to more than a couple of hours for side projects.

Most tools work by checking the response for a 200 OK HTTP response code. But depending upon your use case, you can configure a test that checks whether a certain page is inaccessible to users, and if so, sends you an error message. Furthermore, it is also possible to configure some uptime monitoring tools to look for a particular keyword or term within the response received.

Why is Uptime Monitoring Important?

According to a study by Google, 53% of users abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. A website that is accessible at all times translates to increased customer satisfaction and a more optimized user experience.

If a large chunk of your revenue comes from your website, then you clearly need all your website services to always run without fail. For ecommerce sites, downtime means revenue loss. If the site goes down during peak hours, sales will take a massive hit, not to mention the damage to reputation and loss of customer trust.

If you use an uptime monitoring service, you will be instantly notified when your website is unavailable. These tools often provide analytics, allowing you to identify trends in your availability. For example, it is possible that many people visit your website from a specific region on a public holiday, and this causes your server to crash.

Benefits of Uptime Monitoring

Improving your website’s uptime has many benefits, let’s see a few cases in which implementing uptime monitoring on your website can really help you.

Improved Availability and Search Engine Ranking

Even if the downtime doesn’t seem like a big deal, it affects your site rankings with the majority of search engines. Google’s crawlers constantly scan your website to assess its availability, performance, and content. Even the all-powerful Google is aware that occasionally there will be outages, but prolonged or frequent disruption will definitely hurt your SEO ranking.

Website uptime monitoring helps you stay informed about any disruptions to your website. This includes even the minor ones that you might not be aware of otherwise, but that which search engines picked up on. Early detection of outages lets you take swift action to safeguard your page rankings.

Detect Intrusions

You never know when your site might become the target of hackers. Attackers use a variety of techniques including DNS spoofing and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). At some point, they might take down your website, divert visitors from it (typically to a malicious website), or take advantage of the interaction between you and your users to insert or extract private data.

Many modern uptime monitoring tools check for changes to the DNS records periodically so that you instantly find out if something shady is going on. Some also monitor certificates, ensuring that you will be notified if a hacker tries to tamper with your SSL certificates.

Builds Trust with Visitors

There is not a single person on Earth who enjoys a website that performs slowly, is unavailable, or just isn’t responsive. Should your website experience any downtime, only some of your most loyal clients will wait for that downtime to be resolved. But in many cases visitors will just flock towards your competition. You won’t see that client again if your rivals provide a better, more dependable experience.

A recent survey found that 9% of users who experience a temporarily downed website won’t visit it again. During quiet periods that might not sound like much, but at peak times, or during special events such as Black Friday that 9% could represent a huge proportion of your income.

Detect SLA Breaches

If you are working with a reputable cloud provider, the chances are that, either knowingly or unknowingly, you have signed a service level agreement. These agreements provide assurance that a particular service will be available without disruption or downtime.

Let’s assume a scenario in which your website goes down in the middle of the night for a couple of hours due to an outage at your cloud provider’s end. Fortunately, all this happened when your clients didn’t need your website so you never even found out about the outage.

If you knew about the outage, you would have found out that your cloud provider is unreliable, and take the necessary steps to avoid this in the future. Moreover, many reputable cloud providers offer money back when they suffer extended outages.

For instance, AWS will not charge you for any Single EC2 Instance that is unavailable for more than six minutes within any one hour. Even if you don’t want to shift cloud providers, getting a generous discount on your bill is always desirable – uptime monitoring makes it easy for you to do that.

What to Look For in an Uptime Monitoring Tool

Most website uptime monitors in the market will verify that services and websites are operational by testing their status and monitoring their uptime. However, some tools go beyond simple uptime tracking and provide more insights and useful stats.

When considering which uptime monitoring tool to opt for, these are the essential features that are a must:

1. Monitoring Frequency: A typical website uptime tracker ideally checks the status of the site every couple of seconds – more frequent checks mean quicker detection of issues.
2. Multi-Location Monitoring: If the tool you choose is equipped with global monitoring locations, you’ll be able to simulate user experiences from various regions. This helps identify regional performance issues related to servers.
3. Alerting Capabilities: Always check for alerting options such as email, SMS, or integrations with incident management tools such as Slack and PagerDuty. Customizable alert thresholds and escalation policies are a bonus.
4. Protocol Support: Make sure that the monitor you choose supports the relevant protocols for your applications. For example, if you are serving your website over both IPv4 and IPv6, you would want a service that can handle both.
5. Content Verification: A good uptime tracker should be able to check specific content such as login forms or key elements of your web pages. This feature is vital for ecommerce stores and web applications.

Top Website Monitoring Tools in 2024

You can keep an eye out for any downtime on your website with a variety of monitoring tools available nowadays. There are options for every scenario – from traffic volume tracking to status checks on your website.

Here are the top 4 uptime monitoring tools we would recommend.

Site24x7

Site24x7 lets you check your site’s availability at intervals as short as 60 seconds using monitoring data from over 110 locations worldwide. Additionally, you can keep an eye on your online apps and APIs. Performance trends over time can also be easily identified by analyzing historical data from this tool.

Key Benefits:

• Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring (Web)
• 120+ Global Monitoring Locations
• Public and Private Cloud Monitoring with log management

Site24x7 also allows users to check and configure HTTP headers of your requests. You can even perform advanced checks to see whether a word or a phrase is present on a page by searching the response body using regular expression patterns.

Using Site24x7’s browser plugin, you can keep track of important business transactions and verify them by mimicking traffic from several places. You can either manually specify which button to click on each page or import test scripts from Selenium IDE (a common web automation tool) to run on a real browser, such as Firefox or Chrome, on a regular basis.

Pingdom

Pingdom is a popular tool for tracking the performance of websites. In addition to uptime monitoring, it provides useful features such as real user monitoring, page speed monitoring, artificial interaction testing, immediate warning, and root cause analysis.

Key benefits:

• Page speed analysis
• Transaction monitoring
• Detailed comparison of usage metrics

As for alerts, Pingdom provides real-time warnings via email and SMS for uptime monitoring, 24/7. Additionally, they have more than 70 locations from which your website’s performance is examined, allowing you to see how your website is doing across the globe.

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot combines website, SSL, Ping, Port, Cron job, and Keyword Monitoring all into one solution. Some advanced capabilities include the ability to construct custom HTTP queries with configurable headers, semi-customizable status pages, response times monitors, email-delivered incident updates to subscribers, and maintenance windows.

Key benefits:

• Domain and SSL monitoring
• Cron job monitoring (sometimes called heartbeat monitoring) to monitor tasks, such as wp-cron, that must be performed regularly on a schedule.
• Custom HTTP requests

With UptimeRobot, you can watch your website from several places up to once every 60 seconds for premium plans, and once every five minutes for free. You can get alerts via SMS, RSS, Twitter, email, and push notifications for iPad and iPhone when a website goes offline.

Uptrends

Uptrends provides a range of products such as real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring. With their synthetic monitoring, you can keep an eye on your HTTP(s) endpoints, DNS, security certificates, or any other online services such as SOAP or REST API endpoints using servers from 233 different geographical locations worldwide.

Key benefits:

• Smart alerting and automation features
• Infrastructure Monitoring
• Location-based performance metrics

Uptrends displays all data using interactive charts that allow you to filter by date and time, zoom in on particular features, and examine your stats more closely in order to look for trends in your performance over time.

Furthermore, if there are any speed-related problems with your website, identifying and pinpointing the source becomes easy thanks to their website performance monitoring services.

Wrapping Up

It is evident that ignoring uptime monitoring can have unwanted repercussions for revenue, brand reputation, and user experience. Effective uptime monitoring helps businesses guarantee the dependability and accessibility of their services, which in turn improves customer happiness and boosts revenue.

If you’re looking for a simple and powerful way to manage your PHP web applications and websites on any cloud server provider, you should try RunCloud.

RunCloud is a modern web server panel that automates server configuration and security updates, provides backup and restore features, supports multiple PHP versions and frameworks, offers one-click SSL and Git deployment, and much more.

With RunCloud, you don’t need to be a Linux expert to build a website. You can use our graphical interface and build a business on the cloud affordably.Join thousands of web developers who use RunCloud to manage their cloud servers and web applications. Sign up for RunCloud today!

SSL certificates are essential for ensuring the security and trust of your website visitors. However, occasionally you may encounter errors that prevent your website from loading properly, or from displaying the green padlock icon in the browser.

In this article, we will explain exactly what SSL certificates are, why they are important, and how to fix some of the most common SSL certificate errors that you may encounter.

What are SSL Certificates and Why are They Important?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, which is an old protocol that was used to encrypt the data between a website and a browser. However, SSL has been replaced by a newer and more secure protocol called TLS, which stands for Transport Layer Security.

TLS is the current standard for web security and it has several versions, such as TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. Although they are two different things, people use the terms TLS and SSL interchangeably because they perform the same function.

An SSL certificate (or a TLS certificate) is a digital certificate that verifies the identity of a website and establishes a secure connection with the browser. These certificates are important for several reasons:

• They protect your website by encrypting the data and preventing unauthorized access or tampering.
• They boost your website’s credibility and reputation by showing your visitors that you care about their privacy and security.
• They enhance your website’s SEO ranking by complying with Google’s algorithm, which favors HTTPS websites over HTTP ones.

Check SSL/TLS Certificates

Even the simplest of websites these days uses SSL certificates. If the certificate is installed correctly by the site owner, you probably won’t even notice it.

In most browsers, the lock icon at the start of the address bar denotes that the website is being served over an encrypted connection.

Google has recently phased out the ‘lock’ icon in favor of the ‘tune’ icon since this icon gave a false sense of security to visitors who don’t understand how the web works.

These days, most modern browsers will alert you if you try to visit a site that does not support HTTPS. When you receive such a warning, you will need to manually click “Continue to Site” to visit the web page.

And even after you open the site, your browser will display a “Not Secure” badge in the address bar to remind you that the content on this website can be tampered with.

Check your SSL

Not all SSL certificates are equally trustworthy. Anyone can create a self-signed SSL certificate, but this does not mean that the website is legitimate or safe.

To ensure the authenticity and security of a website, you need to get an SSL certificate from a trusted certificate authority (CA). For example, Google Trust Services is a third-party organization that validates your domain name and other information before issuing the certificate.

A trusted CA is recognized by all major browsers, and it follows certain standards and policies to ensure the quality and security of the certificates. These certificates are installed on your computer by default, and updated automatically from time to time.

RunCloud issues self-signed certificates to make it easier for you to test your websites without paying for a certificate. Since RunCloud is not a trusted CA, our root certificate is not installed on your computer; however, you can install it manually. Installing a root certificate on your computer will only take about 30 seconds, and you only need to do it once.Since it is relatively easy to modify root certificates on your computer, you might want to check if the certificates are properly installed using a third party service such as SSL Checker or GoDaddy SSL Certificate checker. These tools are a quick and easy way to validate your server settings in a human readable way.

The above example shows the certificate chain for ‘runcloud.io’. It shows when the certificate was issued, who issued the certificate, when it will expire, and other relevant information.

How to Fix Common SSL Certificate Errors on Your Website

Despite the benefits of SSL certificates, sometimes errors can occur, resulting in either issues with your website not loading properly, or preventing the green padlock icon from being displayed in the browser.

These errors can be caused by various factors, such as incorrect SSL settings, expired or revoked certificates, mismatched domain names, mixed content, or network issues. Here are some of the most common SSL certificate errors and how to fix them.

NET:ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

This error means that the browser does not trust the SSL certificate for the website. This could happen if the certificate is self-signed, expired, or issued by an untrusted CA.

To fix this error, you need to make sure that you have a valid SSL certificate from a reputable CA that is recognized by all major browsers. You can check the list of trusted CAs from the Mozilla Included CA Certificate List.

You also need to make sure that your SSL certificate is installed correctly on your server, and that it includes all of the intermediate certificates that link your certificate to the root CA.

NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

You might encounter this error when the CN or SAN field of the SSL certificate does not match the domain name of your website. This could happen if the certificate is issued for a different domain, or if there are typos or misspellings in the CN or SAN fields.

To fix this error, you need to make sure that you have a valid SSL certificate that covers all the domain names and subdomains that you want to secure with HTTPS.

For example, if you want to secure ‘www.example.com’ and ‘blog.example.com’, you need to have a wildcard SSL certificate (*.example.com) or a multi-domain SSL certificate (www.example.com, blog.example.com).

You also need to make sure that there are no typos or misspellings in the CN or SAN fields of your certificate.

NET::ERR_CERT_REVOKED

This error means that the SSL certificate has been revoked by the CA. This could happen if the certificate is compromised, misused, or no longer needed by the website owner.

To fix this error, you need to contact your CA and find out why your certificate was revoked and how to get a new one. You also need to remove the revoked certificate from your server and install the new one as soon as possible.

SSL Handshake Failed

You might encounter this error when the browser and the server could not establish a secure connection using SSL. This could happen due to various reasons, such as incompatible SSL protocols, ciphers, or certificates, network issues, firewall settings, or server configuration errors.

To fix this error, you need to troubleshoot the problem from both ends – meaning both the browser and the server.

You can use Projects / SSL Client Test and How’s My SSL? to test your browser’s SSL support.

And for your server, you can use SSL Server Test (Powered by Qualys SSL Labs) and SSL Security Test | ImmuniWeb.

You may need to adjust your SSL settings, update your SSL certificates, or contact your hosting provider or network administrator for assistance.

ERR_SSL_OBSOLETE_VERSION

This error happens when the website is using an outdated or insecure version of SSL that is no longer supported by the browser. This could happen if the website has not updated its SSL configuration to use the latest standards, such as TLS 1.2 or 1.3.

To fix this error, you need to update your SSL configuration to use the most secure and up-to-date version of SSL that is compatible with all major browsers. You may also need to update your SSL certificates or contact your hosting provider for assistance.

ERR_SLL_PROTOCOL_ERROR

This error means that there is a problem with the SSL protocol used by the website. This could happen due to various reasons, such as incorrect SSL settings, corrupted SSL certificates, or malicious interference by third parties.

To fix this error, you need to check your SSL settings and make sure that they are correct and consistent. You may also need to clear your browser’s cache and cookies, disable any extensions or VPNs that may interfere with the SSL connection, or scan your device for malware or viruses.

Mixed Content Error

If the website is loading some resources over HTTP instead of loading everything over HTTPS, it could compromise the security of the page. This could happen if the website has not updated its links, images, scripts, or other elements to use HTTPS URLs.

To fix this error, you need to make sure that all the resources on your website are loaded over HTTPS. You can use tools such as Why No Padlock? or SSL Check to find and fix mixed content issues on your website.

Expired SSL Certificate

SSL certificates are not permanent, and you will need to re-issue them before their expiry date. This error occurs when the SSL certificate for the website has expired and is no longer valid. This could happen if the website owner has forgotten to renew the certificate before its expiration date, or if there are delays or errors in the renewal process.

To fix this error, you need to renew your SSL certificate as soon as possible and install it on your server. You may also need to contact your CA or hosting provider for assistance.

Conclusion

In today’s digital landscapе, SSL certificates are more than just a checkbox for sеcurity; thеy are a cornerstone of online trust and user safеty – maintain your SSL cеrtificatеs for a sеamlеss, sеcurе onlinе еxpеriеncе.

We hope this article helps you resolve any SSL issues on your website and improve your web security. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment below.

If you are looking for a simple and powerful way to manage your cloud servers and install SSL certificates, you should try RunCloud.

RunCloud is a cloud server management panel that lets you host multiple web applications and websites with fast and easy configuration. You can also install, configure, and remove SSL certificates with one click, thanks to RunCloud’s integration with Let’s Encrypt.With RunCloud, you don’t need to be a Linux expert or deal with complex commands to secure your website with SSL. Start using RunCloud today!

WordPress is the most popular content management system on the web, with a CMS market share of 64.3%, and powering over 35 million websites around the world.

Keeping track of a large WordPress site can be a complex and time-consuming process. However, by using Git, a version control software, developers can streamline their workflow.

Git has become an integral part of modern web development, with 93% of developers using it in their projects, according to a recent survey by Stack Overflow.

By leveraging the power of Git with tools such as RunCloud, developers can simplify the deployment process, reduce the risk of errors, and save both time and resources.

Whether you’re a freelance developer or part of a larger team, automating your WordPress deployments with Git is a smart and efficient choice.

In this article, we will show you how to use RunCloud’s Automatic Deployment functionality to create a streamlined workflow.

Note: Before we get started, make sure you have a website stored on one of the supported git providers, and a server connected to RunCloud.

Creating A Web Application

You’ll need to clone your website to RunCloud before we can configure automatic deployments. To do this, go to your RunCloud dashboard and switch over to the “Git Repository” tab and select the git provider where your code is hosted.

Give your application a suitable name, and select whether you want to use an existing user or create a new one.

Note: if you plan to host multiple git repositories, you will need to have a separate owner for each repository, otherwise you will get a “Key already in use” error at a later stage.

Next you will need to specify the domain name that you want to use. If you don’t have a domain yet but want to follow along with this tutorial, you can use the test domain provided by RunCloud.

After specifying the domain name, scroll down to the git section. In the Repository field, enter your git username, followed by a “/”, and then the name of the repository.

In the Branch field, enter the name of the branch that you want to deploy. For example, if the URL of your repository is “https://github.com/tatticoder/my-wp-site” then you need to enter “tatticoder/my-wp-site” in the repository field.

Next, you’ll need to configure the deployment key. If you don’t have a deployment key, click on “Generate key” and it will generate a new key for your current user. You’ll then need to add the deployment key of this RunCloud user to your git server.

This is a straightforward process. Go to your git repository and open the “Settings” tab. Look for the “DeploymentKeys” menu and click on “Addkey”. Now paste the key that was shown in RunCloud dashboard and click “Save”.

After you have added the key, you should see it in your git dashboard. Now, you can go back to the RunCloud dashboard and continue the rest of the setup.

You can specify where you want to automatically backup your site or select the PHP version that you want to use.

Once you have made all the necessary changes, click on “Deploy” to finish the setup.

Configuring Atomic Deployment on RunCloud

After adding the web application to your server, you can take advantage of RunCloud’s Atomic Deployment functionality. This streamlines your website management process, and automatically updates your website whenever you push a commit to git repository.

To configure Atomic deployment, go to RunCloud dashboard and look for “Atomic Deployment” in the left submenu. Now, click on “Add New Project” to get started.

The setup process is super simple, and takes only a couple of seconds – you only need to provide a descriptive name for the project and specify the application that you want to deploy. Once you click “Save”, your web application will be converted to use Atomic deployment.

Note: The dropdown menu will only list web applications that are currently deployed on your server via git. If you don’t see your application in the list, make sure you completed the creating a web application step successfully.

After you have created a web application project, you will need to add a Webhook to your git server – this notifies RunCloud when a change has been made to your application.

To configure a webhook, open the “Project info” page in RunCloud – you will see a webhook URL. Copy that URL and go to your git server. Open the “Settings” tab of your repository and look for the “Webhooks” menu.

In the webhook section, create a new webhook, and paste the URL that we copied earlier into the payload URL field. Change the content type to “application/json” and make sure that push event will trigger the webhook. Click on “Add” to finish the setup.

Testing the Deployment

Once you have added the webhook, RunCloud will be notified about any changes made to your web application, and will automatically update the live website.

To test this, make a small change to your website. Once you commit and push the changes to the right branch, it will trigger a webhook event.

You can verify whether this event was successful by hovering over the webhook URL on your git server:

When an event is delivered to RunCloud, the Atomic deployment will automatically fetch all the new changes, try to build a new copy of the website, and publish it on the server.

You can see the number of failed and successful deployments in the Atomic Deployments dashboard:

If a deployment is failing for any reason, you can see its build logs by clicking on the name of the deployment, and use these to identify which step is failing – and act accordingly.

Conclusion

Using Git to automate WordPress deployments saves time and allows multiple developers to work on the same codebase. RunCloud’s Atomic Deployment functionality simplifies the deployment process by automatically pushing the changes to the live server –reducing the risk of errors and downtime.

If you’re tired of managing your own servers – you might want to check out RunCloud (yep, that’s us!). RunCloud is built for developers that want to focus on shipping great work, not on managing their infrastructure.

Discover what a painless server configuration feels like, allowing you to avoid having to spend hours figuring it out. Get started with RunCloud today, and get up and running in minutes.

LSCache is a built-in page caching feature of the OpenLiteSpeed web server that can significantly improve the speed and performance of your website by storing frequently accessed data in a cache.

In this article, we’ll show you exactly how to use LSCache on RunCloud servers in web applications that don’t already have built-in LSCache support.

Prerequisites

Before you start, you’ll need to have the following:

• A RunCloud account, and a connected server with the OpenLiteSpeed stack.
• A web application installed on your server.

How to Choose Between Public and Private Caching

Caching is a technique that allows the web server to store frequently accessed data in a temporary storage area, called a cache. This can improve the speed and performance of the website by reducing the amount of time it takes for the server to process and retrieve the data when a user requests a page.

What is Public Caching?

Public caching, also known as shared caching, is when the cache is used by more than one client. For example, a reverse proxy or a gateway cache can act as a public cache for multiple users.

Public caching can offer a greater performance gain and a much greater scalability gain, as a user may receive cached copies of web pages without ever having obtained a copy directly from the origin server themselves.

For example, if you have a website that sells books, you might want to use public cache for the pages that show the book details, reviews, or categories. These pages are the same for all users, and so can be served from a public cache.

What is Private Caching?

A private cache, however, is only accessible to an individual visitor. It usually contains information that is only relevant to that particular user, such as the WordPress admin bar, the shopping cart, or their profile page. When a page is privately-cached, there is a separate, personalized copy stored for each user that requests it.

For example, if you have a website that sells books, you might want to use a private cache for the pages that show the user’s order history, wishlist, or recommendations. These pages are different for each user, and so should not be served from a public cache.

When to Use Public Caching, Private Caching, or No Caching

Each particular URL of a website can be set up to be publicly cached, privately cached, or not cached at all, but cannot be both publicly and privatly cached at the same time. That is to say, you can only set up one cache type for a particular URL. Depending on the situation, you might want to set different URLs to be cached differently. The following outlines a few scenarios helpful in determining which type of caching should be used for a URL or a set of URLs.

Use public caching for web pages that:

• Do not change frequently.
• Have high demand (requested frequently).
• Are not sensitive or confidential.
• Do not depend on who is looking at them.

Use private caching for web pages that:

• Can only be used by one user/client, such as personal information on a website (for authorized users).
• Use resources such as documents that are only available for one particular user or authorized users.
• Generates responses with cookies.

Use no caching for web pages that:

• Use a POST request.
• Have dynamic content (such as time sensitive info).
• Change frequently.
• Should not be stored, such as the user’s payment details.

How Cache Settings are Inherited and Overridden in LiteSpeed Servers

Cache settings can be configured at different levels, such as server, virtual host, context, and script handler. The settings at each level affect how the cache works for the web pages under that level.

Cache settings follow a general-to-specific hierarchy, and specific settings override general settings. This means that:

• Cache settings at the server level apply to all web pages on the server, unless they are overridden by lower-level settings.
• Cache settings at the virtual host level apply to all web pages under that virtual host (web application), unless they are overridden by lower-level settings.
• Cache settings at the context level apply to all web pages under that context (location), unless they are overridden by lower-level settings.

For example, if you enable public cache at the server level, but disable it at the virtual host level, then public cache will be disabled for all web pages under that virtual host.

Enabling Caching

To use LSCache on RunCloud servers, you need to do the following steps:

1. Enable the LSCache Module at Server Level

The first step is to enable the LSCache module on your OpenLiteSpeed server. You can do this by logging into the RunCloud dashboard, navigating to the server dashboard, and clicking on the “LiteSPeed” button in the left menu.

Here, you can edit the module cache block and set the following settings at the server level:

module cache {
  ls_enabled              1 # Enable LSCache module
  storagePath $VH_ROOT/lscache # Set the cache storage path
  checkPrivateCache   1 # Enable checking private cache
  checkPublicCache    1 # Enable checking public cache
  maxCacheObjSize     10000000 # Set the maximum cache object size in bytes
  maxStaleAge         200 # Set the maximum stale age in seconds
  qsCache             1 # Enable caching URIs with query strings
  reqCookieCache      1 # Enable caching requests with cookies
  respCookieCache     0 # Disable caching responses with Set-Cookie header
  ignoreReqCacheCtrl  0 # Respect the cache control settings in the request
  ignoreRespCacheCtrl 0 # Respect the cache control settings in the response
  enableCache         1 # Enable public cache
  expireInSeconds     3600 # expiration time for public cache in seconds
  enablePrivateCache  0 # Disable private cache
  privateExpireInSeconds 3600 # expiration time for private cache in seconds
}

You can also adjust other settings according to your preferences and needs, such as expireInSeconds, maxStaleAge, qsCache, etc. You can find more information about these settings in the OpenLiteSpeed documentation.

After editing the module cache block, save the changes and restart the OpenLiteSpeed server.

2. Configure Virtual Host-Level Cache Settings

If you have more than one web application on your server, you may want to customize the cache settings for each virtual host. If you do not configure any cache settings at the virtual host level, then the cache settings at the server level will be inherited.

To configure cache settings at the virtual host level, you need to add the cache module under each virtual host, and edit the OpenLiteSpeed config file to configure settings in the same way that you did at the server level.

Using the .htaccess File

An .htaccess file is a configuration file that allows you to override the server settings for a specific directory or web application. You can use our file manager tool on our panel to create and edit .htaccess files.

1. Log in to the RunCloud panel and navigate to the file manager tool
2. The next step is to locate the web app root folder of your web application. The web app root folder is the directory where your web application files are stored. For example, if your web application serves content from /public, then that is your web app root folder.
3. Click the New File button and enter ‘.htaccess’ as the file name (including the full stop/period at the start of the filename).
4. Finally, open the .htaccess file with the file manager tool and add rewrite rules. Rewrite rules are instructions that tell OpenLiteSpeed how to handle requests for certain URLs or conditions. You can use rewrite rules to enable or disable caching for specific URLs or web pages.

To enable cache via .htaccess, you can add this script to the .htaccess file:

<IfModule LiteSpeed>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*\.php)?$ - [E=cache-control:max-age=120]
</IfModule>

This will cache all .php files on your web application for 120 seconds.

To enable cache for your entire website except /private URL, you can try something like this:

<IfModule LiteSpeed>
RewriteEngine On
## cache should be available for HEAD or GET requests
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^HEAD|GET$
# excluding certain URLs
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/(private)/$
# cache for 2 mins for php pages only
RewriteRule /(.*\.php)?$ - [E=Cache-Control:max-age=120]
</IfModule>

This will exclude /private URL from caching. You can use this to prevent caching of your admin panel.

To enable private cache for sessions with cookies, you can write the config like this:

<IfModule LiteSpeed>
# for those not met above condition, enable private cache.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^HEAD|GET$
# excluding certain URLs
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/(private)/$
## select which pages to serve from private cache
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !my-cookie=yes
# private cache for however long set in cache policy for php pages only
RewriteRule (.*\.php)?$ - [E=Cache-Control:max-age=120]
RewriteRule (.*\.php)?$ - [E=Cache-Control:private]
</IfModule>

This will enable private cache for users who have a cookie named my-cookie stored on their computer, such as logged-in users or commenters.

You can also use other rewrite conditions and flags to fine-tune your caching rules, such as checking for query strings, headers, etc. You can find more information about rewrite rules on the OpenLiteSpeed Knowledgebase.

3. Test LSCache

The final step is to test if LSCache is working properly on your web application. You can do this by using online tools such as LSCache Check or browser developer tools to check the response headers of your web pages.

You can also use the following curl command to check the headers of a page.

curl -I https://example.com/

Executing the above command should give an output similar to the following screenshot:

This means that OpenLiteSpeed has served a cached page from LSCache and has added a x-litespeed-cache header with a value of ‘hit’.

Conclusion

In this article, we have covered how to customize the LS Cache settings for each virtual host on OpenLiteSpeed, and how to use directives or rewrite rules in the .htaccess file of your virtual host. You can find more information about OpenLiteSPeed cache configuration on the official site.

We hope this article was helpful and informative. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment below.

If you are looking for an easy and convenient way to manage your server, you may want to check out RunCloud. RunCloud is a cloud-based server management platform that allows you to deploy, configure, and monitor your web applications on any cloud provider.With RunCloud, you can easily install and update OpenLiteSpeed, LS Cache, and other web server components with just a few clicks. You can also enjoy features such as SSL certificates, backups, firewall, cron jobs, and more. Start using RunCloud today!

Did you know that a one-second delay in page load time can reduce conversions by 7%?

There is one simple solution to drastically improve the performance of your website…

…caching!

In this article, we will discuss what is caching, and compare two powerful caching solutions – Redis Full-Page Cache and NGINX FastCGI Caching.

Let’s get started!

A Primer on WordPress Caching

Before we dive deep into the comparison, let’s quickly recap what caching is and how it works.

In layman’s terms, caching is the process of storing frequently accessed information in a quickly accessible location, such as RAM or a disk.

Storing this information allows the server to retrieve the data faster when someone requests it. This greatly reduces the page load times as the server needs to do fewer computations to generate all of the content from scratch.

If you are interested to learn more about this topic beyond the scope of this article, then you should read our other articles on What is Object Caching and How To Use Redis Full-Page Caching To Speed Up WordPress.

What Is Redis Full-Page Caching?

Redis is an open-source database that can store key-value pairs in memory – this design makes Redis a great choice for caching data.

Redis Full-Page Caching is a technique for caching WordPress data in such a way that it stores the entire HTML output of a web page in Redis cache memory. This means that when a user requests the web page, the cached HTML is retrieved from Redis memory instead of generating it from scratch, resulting in a faster response time.

Redis full page caching can be enabled easily in the RunCloud dashboard. Just go to your web application dashboard and look for the RunCloud Hub setting. Install the RunCloud Hub plugin to automatically configure the settings.

Once you have installed the plugin, you can change the lifespan of the cached content, or purge it directly from the dashboard.To learn more about this, read our article on How Redis Object Caching can improve your website’s performance.

What Is NGINX FastCGI Caching?

NGINX is a popular web server that is known for its high-performance and stability. NGINX FastCGI caching is a way to store the entire HTML documents to disk for easier access. When a user requests the web page, the cached HTML is retrieved from disk storage, resulting in a faster response time.

NGINX FastCGI caching works by proxying requests from clients to an application server that uses a FastCGI protocol, such as PHP-FPM. It then serves all subsequent requests directly, without contacting the backend again for a specified amount of time.

You can quickly start using this caching method – just go to your RunCloud dashboard and open the web application that you want to optimize. In the dashboard, look for the RunCloud Hub plugin and enable it.

Once you have enabled caching, you can configure additional settings such as the lifespan of cached content, or see how much content has been cached already.To get a deeper understanding of the topic, we recommend you to read our tutorial on NGINX caching and How To Use NGINX FastCGI Cache.

The Benchmarks – What The Data Shows

Having a consistent test environment was our utmost priority to ensure we generated reproducible results.

We deployed three identical WordPress websites running on PHP 8.2 on Ubuntu 22 LTS server to compare the performance differences between Redis Full-Page caching and NGINX FastCGI caching.

On each website, we created a new webpage with 20 paragraphs of text and 2 images. All of the websites had SSL enabled and used identical themes without any additional plugins.

• The first website was tested without any optimizations.
• On the second website, we enabled Redis Full-Page caching.
• On the third website, we used NGINX FastCGI caching.

Finally, all of the websites were tested with a sustained load, one at a time, under identical network conditions using Grafana k6.

During testing, we paid close attention to the number of iterations, which told us how many web requests were completed successfully. We also checked 95 percentile scores of the iteration_duration metric – which told us how long it generally took to open the webpage. For instance, if the p95 score was 1.2 seconds, then it meant that 95% of all requests were completed in under 1.2 seconds.

Let’s see the results!

Unoptimized WordPress

In our tests, we found out that our native WordPress instance could serve approximately 4.77K web requests, with an average request taking nearly 2.15 seconds. Upon closer inspection, we found that some requests were completed fairly quickly (1.1 seconds) while others took much longer (3.41 seconds).

That’s not good. Let’s see if using a caching service helps.

Using Redis Full-Page Caching

Using Redis greatly increases the number of web requests served. In addition to a 2x increase in the number of requests, we also see an improvement in 95 percentile scores. The difference between minimum and maximum time taken to complete the web requests was almost 0. This would provide a much more consistent user experience while browsing.

Using NGINX FastCGI Caching

While using NGINX’s FastCGI caching, we saw a similar improvement in the number of requests, and 95 percentile scores. Once again, the response times are lower and much closer to each other.

Final Results – Which One To Use

There is no clear winner. Our benchmark results showed that Redis Full-Page Caching outperformed NGINX FastCGI caching in terms of response time and the number of requests served per second – but only by the width of a hair. Both of these options are a significant improvement over native WordPress – our advice is that you can use either of them.

It’s a no-brainer that using any type of caching is better than not using anything. Not only will it improve the performance of your website, but it will also reduce the load on your web server, allowing you to serve more customers without any additional increase in hosting costs.

Both Redis Full-Page Caching and NGINX FastCGI caching are excellent caching solutions that can significantly improve website speed and performance. However, if you’re using OpenLiteSpeed server, you should also check out our article on LiteSpeed Cache WordPress Plugin.

Transform your server management experience with RunCloud – the ultimate platform for simplifying website maintenance. RunCloud provides out of the box solutions for implementing caching, issuing SSL certificates, and streamlining your workflow. Sign up to RunCloud today to enjoy more control over your servers, automated backups, and robust security features.