cPanel – Wingrove-Services

Hosting Enhancements

I am on a permanent quest to find out the magical set of values that will help a website perform more quickly. I have noticed at various times that some websites are quite quick, and the same ones can be slow on other occassions.

I had reason to spend some time over the past month and explore why a site was not particularly quick to find that there are some tweaks that can be added. I was a little surprised about this because the hosting company claims that the hosting is optimised for WordPress. Yet it seems we can do further optimisations as well.

I am going to list them in this post for those of you that have access to the control panel you will be able to make these changes yourselves. If you site is running slowly, it can be for many reasons, but if you are concerned drop me a line and I will check your site out and if appropriate make the following changes.

Memory size

I have noted at various times that the memory in use in a large site has been quite small. No idea why other than it appears to be much smaller than the available memory. In our case in this hosting we can reset the default from 128MB to 512MB. It needs to be done in two places. One is in the wp-config.php file as a directive, and the other place is in the PHP settings.

The additional directive in wp-config.php is:

define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘512M’ );

Number of Vars

All websites and applications use Vars or Variables to store things. In the default case this value is set at 2,500. Many new sites including those based on Divi may have more than this. I found that we can increase this figure to 6000. This can be found in PHP settings.

Output Buffering.

This is set to off by default. It should be turned on. This can be found in PHP settings.

PHP version

Many of the plugins and templates require PHP to be at version 7.3 or above. This is worth checking as when I started we were at verson 5.6. This can be found in the control panel.

CDN Turned on

The hosting we use has recently added a feature called a Content Delivery Network which can be turned on. This will offer cached versions of pages available to people wishing to access your site. This can be found in the control panel.

Web Optimisations

There are settings in the site which can be optimised and are low risk by the click of a button in the hosting. This can be found in the control panel. Use the least risk set of options.

CRON

CRON is a timer that launches functions at certain times. It is a scheduler. WordPress uses a crude type of scheduler triggered by a user or bot visiting the website. That one is called wp-cron, It works most of the time, however on some sites there may be queues of tasks waiting to be completed. This is particularly true if the site is not visited that frequently. There is another catch in the hosting which limits the time available for execution. So if there were five tasks waiting to complete, only one of them may be completed. You can get around this problem by configuring a CRON job in the control panel which is more reliable and will execute whether people are visiting the site or not. It is easy to do. You set this to run every minute. This means tasks do not queue up due to lack of visitors. While I do not profess to know a lot of detail here, I suspect that if the queue gets too long the sites slow down because basic housekeeping functons are not being carried out.

The cron job you need to add (once per minute) is below. Replace the domain name with your domain name.

wget -O/dev/null https://yourwebsite.org.uk/wp-cron.php

Staying in control

The primary reason I help charitable and not for profit groups is because they have the least resources and are often limited on what they can achieve with their budgets through the normal IT channels such as web design and development. They are all largely dependent on external help either through volunteers or through contractors.

When I first enter into a relationship with a client, there are a few questions that get asked to establish how much control they have over their current website and IT systems. Often I find that they do not know the answers, or there is someone else that knows the answers. In one case some years ago the person that owned their domain name had passed away. So it was likely with no action taken their website and email systems would fail when the domain name was not renewed.

Tips on what you need to know

Make sure you know the answers to these questions, if you don’t and cannot find anyone that does, it represents a problem for you that may be part of a crisis later. So, make a note of them, and store them somewhere safe, and reference them from your IT policy.

1). Where is my domain name held?

Why?

The domain name is like the golden set of keys to everything. You should know where it is located, and have access to it. If for any reason you needed to leave a relationship with a developer or hosting organisation, it starts with moving the domain name out to somewhere else. You need to know the web address, the password and the email address/ user account. If you do not have access to the email account associated with the domain registration, change it to one you do have access to.

Continue reading Staying in control

Cautionary notes about email and your website

I have had a few cases where mysteriously the website is suddenly not sending emails out allegedly. Further investigation shows it is sending emails out, but the recipient is not receiving them, so what is going on?

Local IT at work?

Inevitably it is because a local IT company has installed Office 365 for you and you are now running over Microsoft Outlook servers. Your local IT person who works with you in your office, had been granted access to the hosting settings to redirect email to the new servers. However the they have omitted to test something.

New Cpanel for migrated websites

The following is available to all of my clients. Each hosting account has a control panel where you can access various things in the hosting. For example set up forwarders, set up email accounts, change the password on email accounts, set up an out of office message. Backup the entire hosting including email. Block countries from accessing the hosting. Continue reading New Cpanel for migrated websites

New Tutorial Videos Added

I often find that I spend a lot of time going over the same things with different people. That was why I set up this website in the first place. If I get enough requests, then I can create a video. I have not added any since the site started, but I have just created some more, and bought some things up to date.

For full details go this page: Video Tutorials (You will need your password to access it).

Of note, particularly for new clients are:

An introduction to Divi, this is the premium template I am using on new premium sites now. It is very flexible and powerful. I give an overview of a website, and show you from the inside how it is constructed. It is different from conventional editing that most of you are used to, but do take a look, it is the future! You can see it in Video Tutorial 11. Continue reading New Tutorial Videos Added

Recovering a broken wordpress website

I look after around 100 wordpress websites. I visit each at least once per quarter and check that the sites are up to date, that the backup process is working and I also take an independent backup at that time, which is stored locally on my systems.

If I find anything not working, partially working or not updated, I investigate why and resolve it.

While most sites are behaving themselves, these are the problems I have found which affect under 5% of the sites I am managing:

Plugins have ended up deactivated
The site is out of date with more than one update pending
The backup process has failed
The white screen of death
Server error codes

Continue reading Recovering a broken wordpress website

Group Email Addresses

Q: What is a group mail address?

A: A single mail address that when added to an email will automatically send the message to a group of recipients. It means you do not have to type in all of the email addresses each time.

I was recently asked how to set up a group email address in Outlook. The person requesting this wanted an easy way to send a message to all of the trustees rather than have to collect all of the email addresses together on the to: line of the mail form in Outlook.

While it is certainly possible to both set up and use a group email address, if your mail is not running on an exchange server, or Outlook 365 (which uses a shared area in the cloud) then nobody else can benefit from having a group mail address.

Why is that important?

Continue reading Group Email Addresses

Troubleshooting email

Occasionally we do get issues with email, and you need to find out where the problem is occurring. It is not necessarily at your end, it may be at the senders end.

Also if you suspect that there may be something not quite right with email please come back here and check. If I am aware of anything, or am working on it, then my status will be reported on this page.

I have created a troubleshooting guide in PPT that you can find on the News page to step you through what you need to do.

The page Troubleshooting Email and associated downloads can be found here.

Managing mail continued….

I mentioned a month ago that I had turned on Spam Assassin in the hosting for my personal email account. This continues to work very well, reducing the burden of filtering out spam messages. It is not 100% foolproof, but it does catch a lot of them.

I use four mechanisms now.

1). Turn on Spam Assassin in the control panel.

2). Create an account filter (affects all mail coming into your domain), to automatically delete mail that achieves 7 plus symbols in the spam bar (it is written like this +++++++). Anything scoring 7 or more is definitely spam.

3). Create a second account filter that will send any messages scoring 5 plus symbols in the spam bar (it is written like this +++++) to a specially created account called suspectspam@[mydomain.org.uk]. So all of this suspected spam is sent to a specific mail account that you can periodically check. 5 + symbols generally means highly likely to be spam.

4). In my Outlook account I use ESET Smart Security. For things that escape the spam filter but are clearly spam (I get a lot of pretend newsletters), these are detected and moved automatically.

These four steps have made processing email a lot easier. If this is of interest I can write a short tutorial on it, it is easy to set up. Let me know by making a comment below.

Additionally

If you use the filtering facilities in your hosting control panel, you can also trap and redirect certain forms of email. This can be quite a powerful tool as well.

Managing SPAM

Many of you running charitable organisations will have a dedicated primary email address that you use for incoming, and sometimes outgoing email. Over time this email address becomes “known” to spammers and you start to receive unsolicited email on it.

While looking at the hosting for many organisations I can see huge email boxes that are full of this type of content. (I only see the size of the mailbox, not the mail). Following the issues I faced with my main email account in October, I decided to look into methods for reducing it, redirecting it, and eliminating it. Some of these are available to you through the hosting you use. I will explain the pro’s and con’s below, and how you can “non destructively” experiment to see how spam management may work for you. Continue reading Managing SPAM