Guide Of Hosting

The Apache web server and PHP scripting language are two of the most important pieces of software on today’s World Wide Web. They are used to run millions of useful scripts in all sorts of areas, from blog themes to full software suites, and deliver billions of pages of content from the server machine to the client’s personal computer.

There are a lot of alternative web server software and scripting languages, but none of them have the widespread popularity and use of these two.

As with any other great software, PHP and Apache can be easily customized and fine tuned to fit the needs of most of the webmasters, server administrators and software developers. There are a lot of modules for Apache and optimizers for PHP, specifically for the purpose if increasing their performance and stability, and they’re practically a must have, especially because you gain benefits while losing nothing except a few Megabytes of space, at most.

mod_deflate. This Apache module will allow you to reduce your site’s pages loading time and bandwidth consumption, which is very useful for the millions of site visitors on slow Internet connections. It works very simple – it just compresses the data that is sent from the server to the client. The compression level and other details are user customizable and you should also test the module with all of the available browsers and disable it on those that don’t work well (Internet Explorer 7, for example). As you may have guessed, the drawback of this module is that it uses more processor time, but if you use a caching software like eAccelerator below, you can easily get around this problem.

mod_gzip. This module performs exactly the same function as mod_deflate, except it’s more efficient and uses another compressing utility (gzip, as you may have guessed). It compresses files 20-30% more effectively than mod_deflate, saving much ore bandwidth every month. The drawback is also the same: it uses processor time to compress the files, which is bad when your CPU is already fully loaded. It also has a higher latency (time between receiving the request and starting the compression and sending it to the client computer), so it’s better used together with mod_deflate (for example, use mod_gzip when you’re serving lots of static files and mod_deflate when sending an email newsletter or serving dynamic pages).

mod_bw. This is a module whose only purpose is to throttle download speed and save bandwidth. It is an output filter for Apache, through which all of the data goes, so you can set the speed limit to only 15Mbps for one site and it will automatically keep it that way. This can be very useful when, for example, you’ve used up almost all of you bandwidth and don’t want to pay for more, so you throttle the speed down until the end of the month. Or you could use it when you have a video sharing site and a site that has just been featured on the front page of Digg and needs all of the speed possible. If you’ve got a 100 Mbps connection to your server, you can limit the speed on the video sharing site to about 20Mbps, and have 80Mbps guaranteed for your Digged site, which will result in it being accessible and not going down because of limited bandwidth.

Zend Optimizer. This is nice runtime software that makes it possible to run Zend Guard encoded PHP scripts and more importantly, accelerate the operation code for higher speed when running PHP scripts.

There are a lot of PHP scripts that are encoded with Zend Guard, and Zend Optimizer lets you run them, plus there’s no downside to just having it installed (besides the faster execution of PHP files .

eAccelerator. This is a great application, which is practically a must have for all web servers (there are alternatives similar to eAccelerator, if it doesn’t work for you). What it does is reduce server loads by about 3-10 times by caching all of the PHP scripts that run in their compiled state, so that any time they’re run again, they won’t have to be recompiled. As you might’ve thought, this greatly speeds up the launch of any PHP scripts (of which almost 70% of all sites are composed of), frees up a lot of RAM memory and processor time, which also increases the overall speed of the server.

As you can see from their descriptions, the above “add-ons” (they’re not technically add-ons) for PHP and Apache can really help you and your server gain a higher performance and be more reliable. And the best thing is that there are literally no drawbacks to installing and having them (I’m not talking about actually using them, but there should be no problems there either)!