WordPress on VPS with Nginx and PHP APC

It was time to pay the yearly fee for shared hosting and I decided to check out some VPS options. Performance was not really a problem as WordPress caching plugins do a good job but I wanted more control of the stack and VPS pricing is not that far off from shared hosting. DigitalOcean plans start at 5 dollars and you get 1 Core with 512MB Memory, 20GB SSD Disk, and 1TB of Transfer. You can setup a droplet in 1 minute and you can pay month to month. No wonder they are doing so well, it makes sense to just try them out. They also have great documentation, API, and an easy to use control panel. Here are some details on how I moved my WordPress blog from shared hosting to VPS and made it really fast with Nginx, PHP APC, and Super Cache.
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Leaflet Map Markers with API Caching

LeafLet Map showing Flickr and Panoraimo Photos with Caching

I was looking at my OpenLayers Flickr And Panoraimo Demo today and I realized that plotting anything on a map with data that comes from an external API should leverage the server. The most important reason for this is caching but there are other benefits. You don’t have to deal with any cross-domain policy or hope for JSONP support since the communication with the API will be server-side. Also, it’s not secure to have API keys in your JavaScript as they can easily be taken, especially with search engines like NerdyData. So, it’s good practice to have these keys on the server. Today, I am going to explore some caching options in PHP and show how to create a nice Leaflet Map with markers generated by API calls that are cached on the server.
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