Wordpress with Nginx on Slicehost

Over the weekend I moved this blog from being hosted on my Dreamhost account to one of my 256mb Slicehost servers.

I’ve done this mainly to stop paying for hosting twice, but also because if I’m going to be talking about performance I can’t possibly have a slow blog and my options were limited with the Dreamhost account.

My immediate problem being that I wanted to move it straight to being served by Ngnix rather than Apache - not something that Wordpress is setup for. After a bit of googling I found that someone had solved all the problems I was going to have for me! This post has blow by blow instructions for setting up a wordpress blog on Slicehost and Ubuntu, I couldn’t have found anything better.

It worked exactly as advertised, but me being me I could help tweaking and updated the nginx site config to include expire header for static assets, like so:

server
  {
 
  listen   80;
  server_name www.motionstandingstill.com;
 
  root   <path_to_site>;
 
  access_log <custom_log_path>/access.log;
  error_log <custom_log_path>/error.log;
 
  location ~* i.+\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png)$
    {
    expires      7d;
    }
 
  location /
    {
    index  index.php index.html;
 
    # Basic version of Wordpress parameters, supporting nice permalinks.
    # include /etc/nginx/conf/wordpress_params.regular;
    # Advanced version of Wordpress parameters supporting nice permalinks and WP Super Cache plugin
    include /etc/nginx/conf/wordpress_params.super_cache;
    }
 
  # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
  location ~ \.php$
    {
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    include /etc/nginx/conf/fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME <site_path>/public/$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
  } # server

Later I found someone had posted a different conf with easy support for multiple blogs, but I’ve not moved to using it as what I’ve got works. What it also does is add the expire clause support like I have done above.

When moving this blog to Slicehost I initially set it up on a temp subdomain to make sure it was working sweet first and because I wanted to try out some different themes and play with a couple of other things.

I quickly discovered that as it was running on a different doman than it was configured for, Wordpress would redirect my browser to the correct domain meaning I couldn’t get into the new site. Ugh. So I had to whip out my sql skills and manually update the appropriate settings.

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'http://temp.motionstandingstill.com' WHERE option_value = 'http://www.motionstandingstill.com';

I actually used a different domain name and explicitly updated two rows rather than the generic ‘where’ clause I have, but you get the idea. This allowed me in which is what I wanted.

Then I took the opportunity to tidy up what plugins I’m using as I’d gotten a bit ‘plugin install happy’ when first setting the blog up. As well as getting rid of unwanted plugins I installed two new plugins I’d recently found, the first a redirection plugin with regex support and the second a security checking plugin.

Once I’d got everything how I wanted it, just sticking with the same theme (the misty tree photo is mine), I grabbed a final db backup from Dreamhost and restored it on Slicehost then changed my DNS A record.

All in all, much easier than I thought it would going to be thanks to some helpful results from google. :-)

Update: Slicehost has been aquired by Rackspace.

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