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.

No related posts.

Step 1: Keyword Analysis

Keyword Analysis is the most important and the first step of the successful SEO marketing.

If you already have product or looking for a new niche market, Keyword Analysis should be done properly and throughly. I use only the tools from Google. Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Simply type one or more possible keywords that you want to research. How to read or use the results depends on what kind of marketing campaign you are interested.

First, select ‘Exact’ instead of the ‘Broad’ for the Match type. This will show the results for the numbers where exact keywords were searched. Since we are targeting the particular exact keywords, Broad or Phrase would reflect incorrect search numbers.

Second, if you are thinking of hosting Google Adsense ADs campaign for the profits, turn on the ‘Estimated Avg CPC’ column (disabled by default) and click on the column to sort by CPC price.

This is a Google Adwords Keyword output of ‘insurance pet’ ordered by Local Search.

Now you can sort the table by search volume or CPC value clicking the heading. Enjoy and have fun. You can download the list by using the download link (csv). So you will be able to do further data manipulation with the data using Excel. You will need to check on the competition before deciding on the keywords. If too many search result found from Google search (more than 100,000), just pass to the next one. Also check out who the top competitors are. If they are very strong and famous website, the odds are you will have difficult times to compete against them.

If you are looking for other good external keywords research tool, you may want to try Market Samurai. It’s free to download and it’s free to use the Keyword Analysis menu even after the trial period ends.

Step 2: Get a domain and hosting account

Get a good hosting account that supports multiple add-on domain: Hostgator has month to month plan. So you can start hosting service with out spending too much on the anual plan. Add-on domain means that you can host websites for the additional domains. You can add unlimited add-on domains to your Hostgator account. Link Directly to Shared Hostgator Web Hosting Page.

Some people are wondering if they would utilize free blogging website such as blogger.com or wordpress.com. But the answer is that you should start with your own domain. There are lots of limitations with these blogging services. For example, you can’t insert ADs in your blog with out paying extra fee for the service. If your own hosting account and Wordpress software, you can do anything that you want freely. Also this is a matter of branding your own site. If you use 3rd party blogging service, you will probably waste your effort on the their brand sites. Get your own domain and hosting service. End of story.

Step 3: Write or get good content articles

Just remember, both human and Google love quality contents. Do not just copy and paste texts from other websites. You get penalty for the duplicated contents. There are few points to think about.

1. Is your article content unique?
2. Are all your keywords strategically positioned throughout the paragraphs?
3. Human friendly?
4. Is it good?

Of course , writing quality article with all the above requirements may not be easy especially when you have no clue about your niche. Then you can use Ghost writers who will write unique articles for you with some fees. Just check out warriorforum.com or similar Internet marketing forum to get some leads.

Step 4: Site Map

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines (not only Google) about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. It is a XML file which contains the list of all the web pages in your site. You can register the Sitemap into your Google Webmaster Tool account and monitor the Google bot indexing status. Moreover, you can have valuable information such as list of related keywords and their ranking in Google Search , list of websites linking to your site, and more.

Sitemap can be generated using the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in if you are using Wordpress blogging software. If not, you can check out this list of sitemap generators.

Step 5: Link building

Link building is a task of creating backlinks to your newly created website. When it comes to organic marketing capaign, you need to be in the first place of the Google search result when the targeted keywords are searched.

It is known that the best way to increase your ranking as one of the top search results, there should be lots of external links to your site. More backlinks will results higher ranking in the search results. I used to think that backlinks can only be created by others. But this is not true. You can create the backlinks to your own website through various free services.

The point is this. Just create as many links to your site as possible. Ask your friends to add links to your site. Join free membership sites and add your homepage linke to your profile page which should be public. Or leave comments on other blogs with your website URL.

Before start building backlinks, create an email address to use for registration purpose only because it’s highly possible that you will receive lots of SPAMish emails to that address.

1. Directory Submission: Some say directory submission is not effective, but you should not ignore this step. This is one of the easiest methods. You might want to start with http://www.easysubmits.com , http://www.freewebsubmission.com/ or search for ‘High PR directory service list’ or something similar.
2. Forum Submission: Just remember, webmasters hate SPAMers. When you post entry in the forum, it is important to post the relevant content to the forum topic
3. Article Submission: One of the popular method to boost your site’s presence. But I admit that writing an ariticle is not easy for me. The popular site for article sharing is of course, http://ezinearticles.com/
4. Video Submission: Create interesting video. It can be simple as series of screen shot of your website. Just add some explanation or texts along with that. There are tons of video sharing site. You can start from Youtube.com and Vimeo.com. Make sure that you provide your keywords and Website URL in the video description. Try Wikipedia’s list of video hosting websites.
5. Link Building: Back links are the heart of the SEO. There are many ways to build backlinks. Such as joining various free membership sites – often they provide a personal profile page that you can set your homepage or simple blog interface so you can write an article about your site. Also you can leave comments on other blogs with the similar interest. Make sure you leave your website URL. Then there are link exchange methods which I am not familiar yet
6. Social Bookmarking: There are tons of social bookmarking , networking sites out there. They are free to join. Use them. Just search ‘Social Bookmarking list’ in the Google and check the results.

Just remember that SPAM submission will not work in a long run. Especially for the wordpress blogs. Most of the Wordpress bloggers are using Akismet (Spam comment filtering service). Once you are marked as spammer, your email address,name, or even IP address will be recorded into the centralized Akismet server. Therefore, your subsequenct comments to other Wordpress blogs will be blocked and filtered out as SPAM. I admit that Akismet is really a powerful SPAM filtering solution.

Also remember backlinks from high PageRank (numerical value set by Google representing relative importance within the particular set) sites are much better and definitely help to increase your site’s PageRank too.

During the link building process, you will join membership for many websites and bookmarking services. Just record the access information (email address,userid,password) and domain name in an Excel or text file. So you will not loose the history of what you have achieved.

Thank you for visiting WP Marketing. Please leave any comment if you have other good resources on the backlink creation strategies.

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