Free SSL Certificates with Let's Encrypt (Ubuntu 16)

Running a secure web site is better for yourself and your users. Modern search engines also favor web sites that use SSL/HTTPS, so utilizing SSL is an important aspect of SEO. But buying a new SSL certificate every couple of years can get expensive, particularly if you run multiple web sites or if you want to protect all the subdomains of one site like mail.mywebsite.com and blog.mywebsite.com.

Installing an SSL Certificate on Nginx

Update April 2018: I'd suggest using Let's Encrypt for this instead.

How to create and install an SSL certificate for Nginx 1.10 on Ubuntu 16. (Apache setup here.) This setup also gets you an A on the SSL Labs SSL Server Test.

Part I: Create and Obtain your SSL Cert

1. Create your key and certificate signing request:

WordPress: Optimizing Nginx and WP Super Cache

Today we're going to compare the performance of a WordPress site before and after we install and optimize the WP Super Cache plugin.

We're running Ubuntu 16.04 Server, Nginx 1.10, PHP 7 with the Zend OPcache, MariaDB, and WordPress 4.6 with a few other plugins (Akismet, Jetpack, Yoast SEO, and Google Analytics). The system itself is a humble virtual server with 1 "core", 2 GB RAM, and SSD storage, costing $10/month.

Recompile Nginx (1.9+) Installed with Apt On Ubuntu 16.04

As mentioned in my older article on the subject, for many years Nginx had no hook for dynamically adding new modules, which meant having to recompile Nginx to add functionality. But the Nginx company has worked to address that issue: as of version 1.9.11, Nginx supports dynamic module loading.

Install the Latest Nginx From Source on Ubuntu 16.04

So you want to install Nginx from source on Ubuntu. However, you want Nginx to work like you had installed it with the package manager. This means the startup file (/etc/init.d/nginx), binary (/usr/sbin/nginx), config directory (/etc/nginx/) and log files (/var/log/nginx/) will all be found in the usual Debian/Ubuntu locations. Fortunately this is pretty easy to do using the Debian dpkg utility and Nginx repos.

Ubuntu 16.04 Web Server with Nginx, MariaDB, Redis, and Drupal 8

As mentioned in my Ubuntu 16.04 and Drupal 7 article, the Ubuntu 16 LTS version has some nice upgrades, including PHP 7, MySQL 5.7, Nginx 1.10, Apache 2.4.18, and MariaDB 10.0.x. Let's see if we can make it work with Nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB, and Drupal 8, using the Redis key-value store as the backend cache instead of Drupal's cache tables. The procedure is largely the same as before, with a few differences for the new Drupal version.

Ubuntu 16.04 Web Server with Nginx, MariaDB, Redis, and Drupal 7

The Drupal 8 version of this article can be found here.

Web Server Performance 2016

This is a shorthand summary of web server performance and caching systems as of March 2016.

General disclaimer: I try to link benchmark results that seem relatively neutral, but as with any survey or study or benchmark roundup, the most pertinent question is cui bono? Ultimately the only reliable benchmarks are those you run yourself in your own environment.