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New Site! php-fpm, nginx and a sprinkle of MySQL

I have had this domain name for over a year now, meaning to grab some hosting and set up a blog. I kept putting this off mostly because I could not find a good hosting provider (great quality and price – I could only find one or the other!). I was quite fussy about the hosting I wanted, as I want a virtual machine so I can play with software as it is released, rather than waiting months for a provider to update (that is IF they provide the software in the first place).

As part of my job, I run a lot of servers on Amazon EC2 anyway, and I love how you get your own server to install whatever you like on. Recently when I heard they offered a free tier for a year I decided to actually set this up. After that year is up, with a reserved instance, it comes to $9.62 a month which is currently a little under £6 – cheap! The other benefit of this is that I can easily scale it if this, strangely, becomes popular.

My Setup

  • EC2 micro instance running Ubuntu 10.10 (ami-e59ca991) in EU-West
  • nginx 0.8.54
  • php 5.3.5 (running it via php-fpm)
  • MySQL 5.1.49 (thought about trying 5.5 but have not heard good reports yet)

I went with the micro instance because it was free (duh!) and is more than enough for now. I recently started using nginx for glam.co.uk based on numerous reports of it being more efficient than Apache, it noticeably is out of the box! I have also enabled the fastcgi cache so pages that have been viewed in the last 5 minutes will be served up immediately to the user. My cache config:

In http (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf):

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fastcgi_cache_path /var/cache/fastcgi_cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=ahme:16m inactive=5m max_size=500m;

In server (/etc/nginx/sites-available/mysite.conf):

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location ~ \.php$ {
    if ( $http_cookie ~* "comment_author_|wordpress_logged|wp-postpass_" ) {
        set $nocache 'Y';
    }
    fastcgi_cache ahme;
    fastcgi_cache_key $request_uri$request_method$request_body;
    fastcgi_cache_valid 200 5m;
    fastcgi_pass_header Set-Cookie;
    fastcgi_cache_use_stale error timeout invalid_header;
    fastcgi_no_cache $nocache $query_string;
    fastcgi_cache_bypass $nocache $query_string;

    fastcgi_pass   localhost:9000;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include        fastcgi_params;
}

Basically this just caches any 200 response from a PHP file for 5 minutes based on the requested URL, method (don’t want to cache a HEAD request and send that to a GET request – see the nginx docs) and body. Also logged in users and requests with a query string are not subjected to the cache. I have found this removes the need for a WordPress plugin for caching (such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache) and I currently see no need for opcode caching or similar – even on glam.co.uk.

So, if you are looking for a great value, reliable, powerful host and are not afraid of some command line work, then EC2 with nginx is the way to go!