Recommended droplet size for wordpress and Joomla combo

You guys rock… ill go with the LEMP stack.

@darknite

@hansen would be right on the mark – my full recommendation goes to NGINX over Apache in more than 99.99% of the cases I work with. This one would be no different.

NGINX does indeed use less RAM than Apache in both high and low-traffic scenarios as it doesn’t do dynamic configuration processing. You have to reload or restart NGINX anytime changes are made.

NGINX also “outsources” requests to PHP-FPM using FastCGI (a proxy of sorts), instead of building in a module like Apache does (i.e. mod_php).

At the end of the day, NGINX simply takes a request and pushes it somewhere else, which is why it can handle more traffic than Apache in most all scenarios, and do it with fewer resources. Apache handles things a little differently, builds modules in to the configuration, etc – that all equates to a lot more resources being used for, in my experience, sub-par performance.

…

For example, with Apache there’s a file called .htaccess, which is what WordPress uses to handle the permalink rewrites (i.e. instead of index.php?p=32 you see /category/post-title).

You can make any number of changes to .htaccess without restarting Apache as that file will be read and processed on-the-fly (i.e. on each request).

With NGINX, if you make changes to the configuration, the only way they take effect is when you do a reload or restart NGINX altogether. NGINX also doesn’t use .htaccess, and the rewrites are a little bit different, but I find them far more simplistic.

The typical WordPress .htaccess looks like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

With NGINX, that gets shrunk down to:

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}

The location block basically tries a URL without a slash, with a slash, and if neither of those are able to handle the request, it pushes the request to index.php with $args which would be, in the case of WordPress, the post ID, category ID, etc. You don’t have to worry about that part though, just having the $args in the location block above is all you need to worry about having in place.