Ben Kemp
Customer
Our GT-Rider.com motorcycle touring forums began life over a decade ago, and evolved from ASP, through phpBB, vBulletin, bbPress and finally to Xenforo. Previous unfortunate experience of software tech support has left us very wary indeed!!!
When I took ownership of the site a few weeks ago, I had to quickly relocate it onto my own VPS server. Next came the task of improving its performance before it crippled my VPS. The starting point was this article: keycdn.com/blog/speed-up-xenforo/
Initial efforts to get server caching running with Zenforo were fruitless. The hosting company (Fastcomet) had a go at installing APCu and Memcached but I could not get Xenforo to use either. Xenforo tech support said their "Help" page was all the help they could offer... I discussed this again with the hosting company, they recommended finding a specialist server technician with Xenforo expertise to help. So I did...
A bit of searching lead me to a bunch of positive comments on the assistance others had received from Matt. I contacted him for help and off we went;
The Forum Index page is now performing very well indeed: gt-rider.com/se-asia-motorcycling/
While Matt was working on the VPS side of things, I installed;
As a footnote, I've been an SEO consultant and web designer for 20 years... I also provide hosting for a number of clients, and interact with tech support people in multiple countries for a variety of reasons.
Matt really stands out as a very honest, extremely knowledgeable and totally professional gentleman. I am seriously impressed by the calibre of support provided, the expertise demonstrated, and the straight answers to all questions asked!
On that basis, I have no hesitation whatsoever in commending Matt's services to anyone in need of assistance.
Kind regards
Ben Kemp
When I took ownership of the site a few weeks ago, I had to quickly relocate it onto my own VPS server. Next came the task of improving its performance before it crippled my VPS. The starting point was this article: keycdn.com/blog/speed-up-xenforo/
Initial efforts to get server caching running with Zenforo were fruitless. The hosting company (Fastcomet) had a go at installing APCu and Memcached but I could not get Xenforo to use either. Xenforo tech support said their "Help" page was all the help they could offer... I discussed this again with the hosting company, they recommended finding a specialist server technician with Xenforo expertise to help. So I did...
A bit of searching lead me to a bunch of positive comments on the assistance others had received from Matt. I contacted him for help and off we went;
- Zendopcache + Memcached installed and configured
- MySQL / Maria DB, ditto - we were only using 2GB of the RAM on the server, the changes allowed us to use the full 8GB for MySQL and InnoDB caching!
- Server performance tuning,
- Server security tuning, installed Maldet A/V
- Installed mod_remoteip because mod_cloudflare was not capturing real visitor IP Addresses
- Installation of ImageMagick PECL, then Nobita Image Optimiser
- Converted Forums to HTTPS / SSL including mod_rewrite, Search & Replace across database to replace http with https on old links.
The Forum Index page is now performing very well indeed: gt-rider.com/se-asia-motorcycling/
While Matt was working on the VPS side of things, I installed;
- Convert Image & Convert Image All
- [bd] Cache - plus defer JS and minify CSS etc
- Lazy Image Loader
As a footnote, I've been an SEO consultant and web designer for 20 years... I also provide hosting for a number of clients, and interact with tech support people in multiple countries for a variety of reasons.
Matt really stands out as a very honest, extremely knowledgeable and totally professional gentleman. I am seriously impressed by the calibre of support provided, the expertise demonstrated, and the straight answers to all questions asked!
On that basis, I have no hesitation whatsoever in commending Matt's services to anyone in need of assistance.
Kind regards
Ben Kemp