Blog hosting is a topic we cover every month on The Hosting News, and most of the time the topics are related to free blogging software and self-hosted blogging platforms. There is, however, another type of blogging platform that is extremely popular. For lack of a better term, I will refer to it as cloud blogging.

Companies such as Google and WordPress offer easily deployable blogging software that they host on their own servers. While WordPress also gives away its software under a free software license, its cloud blogging system is among the most popular.

The benefits of cloud blogging include:

• a maintenance-free system, including unlimited updates
• free or very inexpensive service
• any of the promotional or social media connections that come with the service (such as Blogger-Google Plus integration)

Blog hosting is a significantly more robust option. Some of the benefits are:

• your own hosted domain plus sub-domains, or even additional domains on some accounts
• other website uses: photo gallery, business portfolio, whatever you want
• any blogging software you want – pick and switch all you want
• full customization of templates or even the source code
• ability to host as many blogs as your disk space and bandwidth will allow

If you have little to no experience with web hosting and want to keep things as simple as possible, cloud blogging is an excellent, worry-free choice. But for complete control and a blog that is truly unique, you need to get a website from a reliable hosting company.

Cloud Blogging vs. Blog Hosting

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging apps, likely because it is free and also relatively easy to use. That, however, does not mean you are guaranteed to get quality performance out of the blogging software. WordPress can be snappy and responsive or sluggish and laggy, all depending on how well you have optimized it for performance. The following 5 tips should help you along the way.

1. Use Caching – Caching allows your web server to lessen some of its workload by storing static copies of your most highly sought-after pages. Rather than accessing the database and reloading the page each time, a cached copy will be kept on the server until something is changed.
2. Limit Number of Homepage Posts – Blogs traditionally went on and on forever, often just one long page of text in dozens of entries. This is fine until you start getting a lot of traffic. When that happens, you need to consider limiting the number of front page posts.
3. Optimize Your Database – Your database holds all of your blog’s information. If it is running slowly, so too will your blog. It is quick and easy to optimize MySQL databases, and it is something you should do regularly.
4. Avoid Media Overload – Images and videos make your blog more attractive, but too much of anything can be bad for you. If your blog is taking a long time to load images, embedded YouTube videos, and other rich media content, you should tame it a little. The same goes for ads and anything else that can annoy the user.
5. Choose a Good Web Host – Even if you do all of the above, a slow server or limited memory and CPU power can derail any other optimization techniques. To succeed, you need a web host that is reliable and can handle a WordPress site well.

Used in conjunction, these optimization methods can significantly boost your blog’s performance and ultimately make the experience more pleasant for your users.

5 Ways to Boost WordPress Performance

Most blogging web apps, such as WordPress, use databases to store their data. This means that while the words you type appear in HTML format when someone accesses the site, the information itself is actually stored in a database such as MySQL.

Because of this reality, backing up the files from your HTML documents directory will not save all of the blog posts you spent countless hours writing. In order to save them and protect them, you need to backup your MySQL database. There are a couple of ways to accomplish this, some easier than others.

The common method employed by shared hosting users is to use some type of web frontend for MySQL, such as phpMyAdmin. Simply follow these instructions:

1. Login using your MySQL username and password
2. On the lefthand side, you should see a list of your databases. Click the one you want to backup
3. Select the “export” tab at the top
4. Choose the format from the dropdown menu (SQL is the default and is usually sufficient)
5. Click “GO”

It should open up a save dialog in your web browser, allowing you to save it to your computer.

The above method is great if you want to manually backup your database and always save it to your own computer, but if you have a backup server and want the process to be automated, you will need to use another method. One of the tools that I have used for myself and for many of my clients is AutoMySQLBackup. It is free, open source, and fairly easy to use. Once it is configured, you setup a cron job for it and never have to worry about backing up manually again.

How to Backup Your Blog’s MySQL Database

When evaluating website performance, users commonly look at traffic, server processing power, available RAM, caching techniques, PHP memory usage, database optimization, and many other aspects of web hosting. But web design is often overlooked when it comes to performance. Does web design even have an effect on website performance? The experts would answer: yes.

While it is commonplace to consider aesthetic features when designing a website, you should not neglect the effect it has on performance. The perfect example of this is MySpace. Back when the social networking site was at its apex, its users were given wide latitude with page design, and many inexperienced users literally made their pages inaccessible with an overload of images, animated GIFs, and embedded Flash.

MySpace pages are extreme examples, but there are other, more subtle, performance issues that can affect a site, especially a blog. For example, the reliance on multiple Javascript elements within a page can affect load times.

Performance-enhancing web design techniques include creating clean and simple CSS files, reducing image file size through compression, combining multiple CSS and/or Javascript files, using CSS sprites, using gzip compression for pages, and many others.

Just as you would not launch a site without making sure it was usable and attractive, you should also take the time to make sure it will perform well. This will help users reach your site faster and enjoy crisp and fast performance, and it will help you reduce bandwidth consumption and load on your web server. It is truly a win-win situation.

Does Web Design Affect Site Performance?

Under a normal server load, WordPress is a fast and easy tool to publish blog posts and news articles. When the traffic gets thick, however, WordPress tends to get bogged down, and that can bring your website to a crawl.

To understand why this happens, it is first important to understand how WordPress and other content management systems (CMS) work. When you first publish a WordPress article, it does not create a static HTML file. Instead, it stores your article in a database. When a user requests the URL for that article, PHP accesses the database, retrieves the article, and then tells the web server to create a temporary HTML file for the user to view.

As you can imagine, a page that is accessed thousands or even millions of times a day would put a tremendous load on the server. That is where caching can help. With caching, pages that are accessed frequently are stored as static files on the server. Rather than having to go back to the database every time, even when a page has not been changed, your web server will simply retrieve the cached HTML file and display it for the user.

There are many cache plugins for WordPress, and I will leave it to you to decide the one that is best for your site, but caching is one possible solution to a slow blog with heavy web traffic. Many other CMS packages have cache plugins as well, and even if the one you use does not, you can use a free tool like xcache to cache dynamic PHP pages directly.

Speed Up Your Site with a WordPress Cache Plugin

Apache HTTP Server is the most popular web server on the web, largely due to its wide range of features (modules and plugins), flexibility, and open source development. Even with all its benefits, however, Apache can sometimes struggle with high-traffic and high content volume sites, such as a popular news blog.

To remedy this, some system administrators opt for lightweight, yet powerful alternatives like Ngnix. The disadvantage of lightweight web servers is that they often do not have the flexibility and extensibility that big projects like Apache have. One way to get the best of both worlds is to use a reverse proxy, which Ngnix provides, while still using Apache as your web server.

A proxy sits in front of the web server to better delegate requests. While it may seem counterproductive to add another layer between the user and the web server, it can actually speed up the user experience. When the proxy receives requests for static content, it immediately answers and serves that content to the user, removing some of the load off Apache. When a user accesses something that requires a request for dynamic content, the proxy passes the request to Apache, which handles it as it normally would.

To make it work, you would need to tell Nginx to listen on the normal web server port 80, while Apache would listen on another port. Nginx will then be first in line to receive static requests and still pass off other requests to Apache. For more information about Nginx, visit the project website. For instructions on installing and configuring a reverse proxy, see this article.

Speed Up Your Websites with Reverse Proxy Servers

Do a quick search on the web for content management systems and you will see that there are thousands out there, and most of them are free. Almost all of them have the basic features necessary to run a blog, but not all of them are designed specifically with blogging in mind. Is any one of them sufficient for general blogging, or is there an advantage to using a CMS specifically designed for it?

Probably the most popular blogging platform these days is WordPress. It is made for blogging before anything else, although it does have other general web content management features. Because it is designed specifically for blogging, it has features such as content spam filtering and trackbacks built into it. It also supports a plethora of plugins, many of which are catered to bloggers.

Other content management systems may also have blogging features and may even have plugins designed to support blogging. Many also have features that a CMS like WordPress would not have, such as robust e-commerce support out of the box.
Ultimately, the CMS you choose largely depends on your needs. If blogging or news publishing is your primary goal, WordPress or another blogging platform with similar features would be better. If, however, you have other goals for your website that take precedence over blogging, you may be better off using a CMS that can more easily accommodate those goals. If you need both, it is very common to use more than one CMS to meet a variety of needs.

Will Any CMS Suffice for Blogging?

In a previous post, we looked at WordPress plugins and asked how many plugins were too many to have on one blog. Another question that many may ask is: “How important are WordPress plugin updates?”

WordPress is updated frequently enough, but then you have to deal with seemingly constant updates of all of your plugins. So, what happens if you just ignore the plugin updates?

Generally speaking, your WordPress installation should continue to function properly. Nevertheless, there are a number of reasons why you should still keep your plugins update.

1. Sometimes, new plugin versions are released to fix serious security flaws, just like many WordPress upgrades.
2. If you just upgraded WordPress, you may need to also upgrade your plugin in order for the plugin to continue functioning properly
3. The new plugin version may have new and improved features, and you have nothing to lose by updating.
4. Updating literally takes seconds.
5. You can update all plugins at once with a single click of your mouse button.
6. Updating takes less time than it takes to read this article.
7. Seriously, why are you still reading this and not updating already?

By now, you should feel guilty for not updating your plugins when it is so incredibly easy. All you have to do is click a few links and all of your plugins will be updated. The same applies to WordPress itself. So, is there really any good reason to not keep everything up-to-date? Keeping your WordPress installation up-to-date is easy to do, and it may very well save your website from serious security issues.

How Important Are WordPress Plugin Updates?

Normally, when a WordPress update is released, the changes are pretty subtle. Although the developers often add new features to the free and open source blogging software, the interface has remained pretty consistent since the last major release. WordPress 3.3 is codenamed Sonny after the legendary jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, and this time around the developers decided to improvise and bring in a new interface.

Some of the new features in WordPress 3.3 include:

• hover menus – In older versions, the collapsed menu only showed buttons and revealed the top-level menu options when you hovered over them. WordPress 3.3 furthers the usage of hover menus even to the expanded form, providing them for all sub-menus. Rather than needing to click the expand arrow for each item, you can just hover over it to reveal its sub-menu
• drag-and-drop uploader – There is now a single upload button for all media types, and you can now drag and drop media directly from your desktop or file manager. This uploader works without the aid of Flash player.
• Pointer tips – To help you get used to new features or even old ones if you are a new user, pointer tips popup and reveal important information.
• Better touch screen support – As the world moves to more touch-oriented devices like smartphones and tablets, many users occasionally need to blog on the move without having a laptop handy. WordPress has improved this experience.

Many of the top web hosting companies offer free WordPress installation as part of their standard packages. Even if they do not install the latest version, you can easily log into the WordPress dashboard and perform the update with a few clicks.

A Quick Guide to New Features in WordPress 3.3