I found myself with the option of working out what had gone wrong (the server wouldn’t even boot properly) which I may have managed, or to bite the bullet and start again with a fresh install. I went for the latter because I really couldn’t be bothered with the former and it would enable me to build a few applications in a way I wished I’d done on the first install. Fortunately due to WP-DB-Backup and rdiff-backup I was able to rebuild and restore quite quickly. DefCon 1 at 8.30am, multi-user subscription website and server back up and running at 2.00pm. I even managed to get a temporary forum up and running so that the users had somewhere to hang out. That was on-line at 9.00am.

The new set-up has Nginx proxying to Apache. I’d wanted to do it for ages and so now Nginx serves up the static content, Apache looks after all the PHP and other swanky malarky. I also did a review of the plugins on the site and found that one was really slowing things down to a crawl. It was Social Access Control that seemed to be strangling the server. I swapped it out for Justin Tadlock’s Members plugin. Things are a lot swifter. Maybe I didn’t have Social Access set-up correctly, who knows, it’s toast now. Members takes a little bit more messing about with templates to get it running sweet, but I like the concept and it’s there to stay over at TFA.

I was thinking of writing a few posts on the way I’ve got Nginx and Apache working in tandem but all I did was Google their names with the word proxy thrown in for good measure and all the help you need is already out there.

Google is your friend.