Author: Pothi

WordPress Performance Troubleshooter - WP Hosting Solutions Provider!
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I am hiring!

I’ve been a freelancer since 2008. So, it’s been a decade. I am currently looking for a freelance system admin with keen interests in hosting WordPress and PHP sites. Even though, the hosting market, especially the WordPress hosting market, has some big names in it, there are still plenty of problems to solve.

If you have interests in open source technologies and if you have contributed to open source, that’d be awesome. But, it isn’t mandatory. If you know your stuff, or if you can learn stuff, that’s more than enough. At the same time, communication is a big part of our job.

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Local LEMP Box

I develop sites locally, then migrate the changes to the staging site or to the live site. I never make changes without testing them in my local server. I already have a repo to bootstrap a live server with Nginx, MySQL, PHP and a few more other goodies. However, there are lot of areas to improve to speed-up the development of local sites. For example, PhpMyAdmin runs on its own domain named https://pma.dev (it doesn’t exist on the internet, just a local domain). Since, I do not expose my local server to the internet, I wouldn’t want to enter the credentials whenever I type it in my browser. It saves time! So, here’s my next project… local LEMP server.

Note: This works only on Linux servers and desktops (such as Juno from Elementary OS). Particularly tested on Ubuntu 18.04 based distros. There are a number of alternatives available if you wish you to develop sites locally on a mac or on a Windows PC. Since, I host most of the sites on the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, it make sense to closely resemble the live environment.

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Uptime Monitoring

WordPress is easy to use. Behind the scene, it is a complex piece of software, running on PHP and MySQL. Monitoring the uptime of WordPress sites may seem straightforward. But, in reality, it is easy to miss the downtime using conventional methods.

Let me provide you with an example. Let’s take this site… tinywp.in . I monitor this site using multiple uptime monitoring services. They keep watching the home page at https://www.tinywp.in and see if it shows any errors. They notify me in case of the following errors

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Please don’t hire me!

Please do not hire me because the cost of living in the country where I live is way cheaper than where you live. Just because the cost of living is lower doesn’t mean you can hire my services at a fraction of rate charged by the tech people from your own country!

Of course, the cost of food and real estate are much cheaper here. The cost of food is rapidly increasing here due to globalization of food industry. However, as my life resolves around IT and products related to IT, the cost of tech products are always higher than whichever country you live in!

To illustrate with an example, iPhone X (64GB model) costs USD 999 in US. Here, the same model costs INR 87400 or approximately USD 1378 upon currency conversion. All hardware products are priced higher due to reasons only known to the retailers. Software products aren’t cheap here either, just because the cost of living is way cheaper!

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Oops Moments in DevOps

A post on a new year is usually about resolutions! But, isn’t the best time to revisit the last year’s mistakes and resolve to never repeat it this year (and years to come)?! Since, my strong skills are with DevOps, I’d like to share some oops moments (you may call them blunders) that you’d never want to do it, if you are starting on DevOps or if you just want to understand where things go wrong in DevOps. In general, you go by the defaults, you’d be in trouble in the future. Whatever software you use, make sure you understand the default values and what each of them does! Here are the top three mistakes that I did… Continue reading “Oops Moments in DevOps”

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Excluding iPad from wp_is_mobile!

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Mobile Detect Logo by Dragoș Gavrilă!

wp_is_mobile function in WordPress considers iPad as mobile! This scenario creates issues on iPad, iPad Pro, or any relevant tablets. To be precise, iPads are shown a mobile version of a site rather than the desktop version! Searching the internet didn’t yield a clean way to overcome this situation. Heck, there are even plugins to detect mobile devices and to exclude iPads from being mobiles.

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WP Rocket – Nginx configuration

I prefer open-source software and have been a long-time advocate of OSS in general. Recently, I started liking WP Rocket plugin that offers some unique features. I already have a perfect Nginx configuration for WP Super Cache plugin (that I consider as the best full-cache plugin till date). Since, WP Rocket uses disk caching like WPSC, I wanted to quickly convert the existing configurations to fit WP Rocket. I did succeed in it and you can find it in my WordPress-Nginx repo. Here I explain how WP Rocket stores the cached content and how it could be integrated into Nginx.

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