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FastDomain’s shared hosting account is OK and this is my second year with FastDomain. About a year ago, I had a little project to work with Magento. I had to deploy an ecommerce site and I reviewed various free shopping cart solutions. And my final decision was Magento. It’s an open source software and backed by large and active community. It is pretty flexible, powerful and free.

However, the catch was that the Magento requires at least 32 M for the memory_limit settings of php.ini. (Now the minimum memory requirement is unbelievable 256M) But 48M or 64M was recommended. Also it needs more CPU power because it is based on Zend Framwork. Zend Framework is very popular framework from the Zend, maker of PHP. But it requires much more memory and CPU power than conventional PHP scripts.

But the FastDomain’s default PHP memory_limit was 32M and the Magento’s initial speed under FastDomains’s shared account was somewhat slow and disappointing. However, for me, there was no additional budget for a dedicated server or even a Virtual Private Server which costs at least $35 per month.

So I decided to look for the ways to optimize the Magento. Many discussion forum articles were discussing about APC (Alternative PHP Cache) PHP extension. This extension is basically to boost the performance of software applications written using the PHP. Most PHP accelerators work by caching the compiled bytecode of PHP scripts to avoid the overhead of parsing and compiling source code on each request. And it can improve the speed by 1~3 times faster. I was really happy becauseI thought that I finally found the right solution.

But then I realized that FastDomains’s PHP configuration does not support APC extension by default. At this point, I was really tired of Magento but decided to give one more chance and searched Google and tried everything that I could with CPanel.

And I finally found the way to increase the memory limit over default 32M and how to deploy APC extension under FastDomain. So here they are.

Requirements:

• You need to have SSH terminal access to your account. By default SSH access is not enabled, but you can easily get the access by applying for it. (Try ‘SSL/Shell access’ icon in CPanel)

If this is your first time with SSH, you should download PuTTY SSH terminal program.

• Some knowledge of Linux console command is recommended. (For example, how to navigate between folders , list directories, move files, etc) But you can use FTP program to do the same tasks.

Step 1

From the CPanel, click on the ‘PHP Config’ icon.

Step 2

From the page, you can have customized php.ini in your ~/public_html folder. First , you will need to decide how to load customized php.ini file. If you want to create one php.ini file and use it globally through out the subdirectories and add domains folders, select “PHP5(Sing php.ini)” option. If you want to have different settings in php.ini for different addon domains, select “PHP5”. If you select ‘PHP5’, you will need to save php.ini in each subdirectories that you want to apply customized php.ini settings.

Second, click on the ‘INSTALL PHP.INI MASTER FILE’ button to save default php.ini.default file into your ~/public_html folder. You can edit this file according to your needs and renamed it to php.ini later.

Also , at this point, I recommend you to create test.php and add below snippet to check the APC extension is installed and enabled successfully at a later time. This file can be saved anywhere but let’s save it right in the ~/public_html, so you can access it by typing ‘http://yourdomain.com/test.php’

<?php
phpinfo();
?>;

Why don’t you test it now? You will see a webpage similar to below image. If you try to find keyword “APC” in the web browser, you won’t be able to find it since we haven’t enable it yet.

Also note that the default memory size is 32M.

Step 3

Now rename the ~/public_html/php.ini.default file to ~/public_html/php.ini. Then you can use ‘vi’ editor or download to your PC using FTP to edit it.

First, we would like to increase the memory_limit. Search the ‘memory_limit’ keyword and edit it to your preferred amount of memory. I used 128M just for this demo. For your information, I never used large number for the memory. I used less than 64M just in case.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Resource Limits ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
max_execution_time = 30     ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 60     ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data
memory_limit = 128M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (32MB)

After editing the file, you can try to reload the test.php page to see if the update is reflected properly.

Ok, this was easy.

Step 4

Now, we are ready to deploy APC extension. Fortunately, FastDomain shared hosting account provides C compiler. You will need to download APC source code and compile apc.so and define it in the custom php.ini file. The compilation process is not that difficult.

Download http://pecl.php.net/get/APC-3.1.2.tgz and upload into your account path ~/public_html

Now login to your FastDomain SSH account and run below commands.

#cd public_html
#gunzip APC-3.1.2.tgz ; tar xf APC-3.1.2.tar
#cd APC-3.1.2
#/usr/bin/phpize
#./configure --enable-apc --enable-apc-mmap  --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config
#make
#cp modules/apc.so ~/public_html

After this, you will have apc.so file in the ~/public_html folder. Now you are almost ready.

More references:

• APC Website: http://pecl.php.net/package/APC
• Also check http://php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php for the detailed compile instructions.

Step 5

Open php.ini to edit file again. At the end of the file add below lines. Note that “yourid” in the extension path should be your login id.

[apc]
apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_segments = 1
apc.shm_size = 64
apc.max_file_size = 10M
apc.stat=1
 
extension=../../../../../../home/yourid/public_html/apc.so

Once you save the file, try the test.php file to see if APC is loaded successfully. If you search for the keyword “APC”, you will be able to find one. Wonderful!

If you can’t find “APC”, check out the ~/public_html/error_log. You will be able to find some clues why it didn’t work.

Remember, APC extension helps not only Magento but all PHP applications. Once the setup is completed, it affect all the addon domains too (under single php.ini option). Enjoy the benefits of APC today! I mean if you are using FastDomain shared hosting service.

One thing to note is that you will need to compile apc.so everytime the PHP is upgraded in your FastDomain server. When the PHP version is upgraded, your old apc.so won’t work unless you compile it again.

Thank you for reading and please leave any comment.

As a simple minded person , I have only used Wikipedia to look up things, but not actually joined or contributed as a member before. But by contributing and adding up your ‘links’ in the related keyword /External link section, you can have good organic traffic coming to your websites.

Some of the key points mentioned by the article discuses below items.

• Search your company name on Wikipedia. (Or the terms related to your keywords)
• Start with a stub.
• Include links to third-party sites.

Personally, I believe adding links to the External Links section would work nicely. But beware, others can update or delete the links freely as you can update the links in the webpage. And there is a moderator who monitors the quality of the data being updated.

This is a External Links section of ‘Netbook’ result page

This is a edit page of the External Links section.

Anyone can update the page. But for the popular keywords, the moderator or other users activities are very active and eventually your modification may be deleted if yours found to be SPAM links.

Therefore I recommend you to add links with high quality informational pages only that someone might actually benefit from the information.

For example, you can have a Gmail account that you use only for the communication with your family and friends. However, you don’t want to mix up with business and personal life, so you might have another Gmail account for business only purpose.

However, when you use two different Gmail accounts at the same time, you would find it difficult to check the emails at the same time. Especially if you are checking both accounts often, you will need to login to Gmail every time you check the other account’s emails

Now here is the easiest way to logged into both email accounts and keep checking both emails at the same time without ever logging in again.

Firefox supports multiple profiles that you can run separate instance of Firefox with different user profiles at the same time under the same windows session.

This image is the actual screen capture of the Firefox running with two different profile information. I have applied custom theme for one of them, so I would easily distinguish one from the other.

So here it is how to set this up. It may require little bit of knowledge on Windows system, but not really. Anybody can do this.

First, make sure there is no Firefox instance is running, then run below command with Run dialog ( Win + R keyboard shortcut or can be accessed from the Start button)

firefox.exe –ProfileManager

Then below profile manager dialog will be shown. You can easily create and delete profiles.

I have create a new profile named ‘wpmarketing’. When a new profile is created, a new profile folder is created with initial bookmark and settings under Firefox Application Data folder.

Then you need to create Firefox shortcuts. After creating shortcuts, you need to add extra arguments at the end of the target executable string. Addtional –P option with your new profile name (in this example, ‘wpmarketing’) and –no-remote option. So the final Target string would be something like below.

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P wpmarketing -no-remote

Now you can rename the shortcut icon to make it easy to distinguish and double click to run it.

However you may want the new profile to have your default profile’s customized settings such as bookmarks and addon extensions. Easy way is that you can manually copy the ‘default’ profile folder to the new profile folder.

First turn off Firefox and then open the Firefox profile folder by typing in below path info into the Run dialog. (Win + R)

%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

You can delete the newly created profile folder ( for below example, I should delete ‘eelfbl6b.wpmarketing’ folder) and copy ‘pc74fkie.default’ and rename the new copied folder into the same name ‘eelfbl6b.wpmarketing’

Then you can run the Firefox using the ‘wpmarketing’ shortcut icon created before, and see that all the default profile’s settings and addon extensions are migrated to the new ‘wpmarketing’ profile successfully.

So enjoy multiple identities with Firefox. Using multiple Gmail accounts at the same time is much easier and fun. Of course, you can build more links with this multiple identities method too!

Thank you for visiting WP Marketing.