Get A PHP Cache For Your Blog Server

If you are using shared hosting, you probably know just how difficult it is to take full advantage of the resources your host is offering you. Long before you hit the storage and bandwidth limits, you over use system resources. Unfortunately, hosts never share with you what exactly those limits are. There are a myriad of WordPress plugins that help you cache your site and lower the cpu cycles that you are using. For those of use who use a VPS or dedicated server, we have a better solution.

There are PHP caching addons that we can install in our VPS or dedicated server to reduce the amount of cpu cycles a particular WordPress blog is using and pile even more sites onto our server. There are several to choose from including eaccelerator and APC. I have personal experience with both of these and my personal favorite is APC. In fact, Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is going to have native support in PHP 6. It works well with all versions of PHP and once installed, it just works.

I have put together a couple of tutorials on installing APC on a couple of different platforms. Of course my preferred platform is Ubuntu, but I have also included a tutorial for installing it on Centos 5.2.

Have fun:

Installing APC on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
Installing APC on Centos 5.2