VPS web hosting is one of the fastest-growing and most popular web hosting services, with the market expected to reach $8.3 billion by 2026, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.2 per cent.

This is a web hosting solution that hosts your website on a virtual private server, offering guaranteed and dedicated resources such as CPU cores, RAM, memory and disk space. Although there may be several websites on a single server, each website is allocated its own virtual private server, with full root access and customisation options.

VPS web hosting is therefore the perfect middle ground between shared and dedicated hosting, offering reliable features such as performance, uptime, security and flexibility, all at a much more affordable price than dedicated hosting.

Despite its features and benefits, optimising a VPS web hosting server is important to ensure reliable page speed and advanced security. This article outlines the importance of optimising a VPS hosting server and presents some key methods.

Why is it worth optimising your VPS server?

Even though VPS servers offer high page load speeds and performance, once your website starts to slow down, stutter too often and suffer from performance issues, it’s time to optimise your VPS hosting server.

The default application settings and server configurations are inadequate and irrelevant for ensuring smooth page loading speeds and performance.

Optimising a VPS server helps with the following:

• Lower memory usage
• Handling work more efficiently
• Increasing the speed of work
• Improving overall performance

So, if you want to achieve these results on your business website, improve its response time and minimise the overall load on the server, let’s take a look at the most important and simplest ways to do so.

5 tips for optimising your VPS web server

Here are a few tips and simple methods for optimising your VPS server to ensure smooth performance and faster page load times, thereby maximising customer satisfaction.

Optimise your Apache settings

Incorrect or inappropriate Apache settings can cause major headaches and reduce your website’s speed and performance. You should therefore configure Apache’s settings to suit your business needs in order to speed up your website and eliminate performance bottlenecks or other issues.

To improve server performance, it is recommended that you optimise the KeepAlive, StartServers and MaxClients settings on your VPS web hosting server. It may also be worth considering using Nginx, which in many cases enables faster service delivery.

A few tips:

• Adjust the MaxClients (Apache) or worker_processes/worker_connections (Nginx) values to match the available RAM.
• Use caching modules (e.g. mod_cache for Apache, FastCGI Cache for Nginx).
• Enable gzip/deflate compression (mod_deflate for Apache, gzip for Nginx).
• Remove unused modules and virtual hosts.

Caching content

Caching website content has been proven to reduce latency issues and speed up the performance of your website and its processes, particularly if your website handles high traffic volumes.

Caching website content and data in RAM – this temporarily stores frequently accessed content to reduce access and page response times, as well as improve page speed and performance. Thus, when users request the content of a page, it is served immediately from the cache rather than being processed by the server, which reduces user waiting times and ensures a high-quality experience.

There are several types of caching software available for VPS, such as Varnish, Squid and Memcached.

Update your MySQL version

Updating the MySQL database version is always important, as it is an essential step in optimising VPS servers.

The reason for this is that older versions no longer receive regular security updates and patches, which impairs your website’s performance and leaves it vulnerable to attacks.

So, to achieve maximum performance and minimise response times, check for the latest version of MySQL and use that instead of an older version.

A few tips:

• Tuning: Adjust key parameters in the my.cnf file (e.g. innodb_buffer_pool_size, query_cache_size – proceed with caution!). Use tools such as mysqltuner.
• Optimised Queries: Write efficient SQL code and use indexes. Analyse slow queries from the logs.
• Routine Maintenance: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE from time to time (on large tables) to delete unnecessary data.

Consider using a CDN network

A CDN, or content delivery network, is a fantastic way to help deliver website content and data to users more quickly.

It stores static content at nodes, thereby reducing the distance between the VPS server and users. Furthermore, these CDNs are distributed across global data centres around the world. This means that content is delivered from the nearest global data centre, resulting in faster delivery and page load speeds when requested by the user.

Content optimisation

Optimising your website’s content results in better server performance and page load speeds, including the media files and images on your website.

There are numerous free tools available on the market to help you analyse your website’s content, such as SEMrush, SurferSEO and Hemingway. These tools help identify areas of your website where content optimisation is needed, and also provide speed and performance metrics to help you achieve the best results. In this way, they also help to improve your website’s front-end configurations, as well as its back-end server settings and configurations.

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