If you want your Wordpress website to be fast, this is the service for you. With this service, we will build a new Wordpress environment for you on Digital Ocean (at a location of your choice and price per month of your choice) using the LATEST and GREATEST tools, speed boosts, caching services, compilation engines and more to ensure your site loads in the fastest speeds possible for a single server configuration.

See how fast the Super Speedy Plugins stack is in action

This video shows a Woocommerce site I set up which is running on a fresh Super Speedy Plugins installation on a $5pcm Digital Ocean server. It’s VERY fast. If you go for the $10 or $20pcm plan, it’ll be even faster.

You can also DIY this Wordpress installation if you like or get us to do the installation for a fresh site or you can handle the migration yourself.

What’s included in the Super Speedy Plugins stack

The Super Speedy Plugins stack is a fork of the Mercury stack originally built by WP Engine. I’ve modified it a bit to include the Ajenti web management service, letsencrypt SSL, fail2ban, ufw firewall and I’ve recompiled NGINX to pass through the originator IP addresses from the Cloudflare servers.

• Cloudflare CDN
• Varnish  cache
• fail2ban to stop bot attacks early in the stack
• Nginx – recompiled to pass through originator IPs with Cloudflare so it’s fail2ban compatible
• PerconaDB – about twice the speed as MySQL and 100% compatible
• PHP 7
• Ajenti web management interface
• phpMyAdmin db management interface
• Letsencrypt lifetime SSL
• SFTP and SSH access to your own Digital Ocean droplet
• PerconaDB and Nginx configured properly to cache and scale

Digital Ocean chosen for hosting your Wordpress site

Chosen because they use RAID SSD – that’s lots of super-fast solid state disks. SSDs can be up to 100 times faster than HDD depending on how much seeking is done against the disks. With a WordPress website and 100s of files per page scattered across the disks, that’s a large speed boost for your WordPress site.

Note the really low latency here – great for fast Wordpress and really fast WooCommerce setups with thousands of files required per page load. Full comparison of SSD vs HDD.

Note that Digital Ocean are not providing support for software installed on their servers – if you’re looking for having someone on hand to support you with a setup like this, you should really consider using WP Engine instead. They provide Managed Wordpress Hosting which obviously costs a bit more, but they’re the ones you commissioned this setup so if you go with them, you’ll get good performance PLUS support when you need it. Find out more about pricing plans for WP Engine here.

If, on the other hand, you DO decide to go with Digital Ocean and this Super Speedy Plugins stack then you can see the Digital Ocean monthly plans here.

If you wish to go with a different host – the only real requirement is that you get them to install Ubuntu 14.04 or above.

The recommended minimum droplet is $20pcm so you can take advantage of InnoDB caching.

Nginx chosen for your web server

Apache is the most common web server used by web hosts around the world. The reason for that is because it’s incredibly stable and has a ton of modules to make it work with anything. This reduces support costs for hosts but it really sucks when it comes to supporting more than a dozen simultaneous users on your Wordpress site. Apache eats RAM.

Nginx on the other hand, has been built as an event-based-web-service and as such it hardly uses any RAM at all. It’s also super-fast at serving up files and images. Nginx doesn’t actually process your PHP files (PHP is what Wordpress is written in) but Nginx CAN pass through files to other processes in order to generate the HTML your users will see.

Note the really terrible response rate for Apache at 25 simultaneous users. Full performance review of Nginx vs Apache.

PHP 7 to process your PHP files

PHP 7 has brought massive speed improvements over PHP 5 and with its inbuilt opcode caching it’s as fast as HHVM with a lighter memory footprint.

Note that PHP-NG is not yet stable – it should be out by 2016. Full performance review of HHVM vs PHP-FPM here.

Percona DB chosen over MySQL

Yes, that’s right – this installation won’t be using MySQL. Don’t worry though, because PerconaDB is 100% compatible with MySQL and is a LOT faster.

Percona performance vs MySQL. Full performance comparison available here.

Varnish added for the final performance polish

Varnish is also included – that’s an HTML caching engine – the fastest on the planet.

It works in conjunction with the W3 Total Cache plugin and your installation comes with exceptions added for various WooCommerce pages that cannot be cached (basket, checkout etc).

Purchase Options

Here’s a breakdown of the 2 options available (choose your option above next to the product image where it says ‘Service Required’)

Install only

• You will point your domain name at your new Digital Ocean server IP address
• We will set up all of the above elements on your new Digital Ocean server (or Ubuntu 14.04 server of your choice)
• We will install and configure W3 Total Cache for you to make best use of your new features
• You will then have a brand-new, clean, empty, highest-performance-possible installation of Wordpress

What you need to do:

• Buy the Super Speedy Plugins Install service
• Create a digital ocean account here and reply to your Super Speedy Plugins order email with your digital ocean email address so we can send your completed snapshot and the domain name you would like to use for your first website
• We will build your server and email you when done
• We include a guide to accept your snapshot and create a droplet in the location of your choice
• Once your snapshot is created, change your DNS to point the A record for your domain name at your new droplet IP address and that’s you done

Install + Migrate

• Everything from the Install + Migrate package

What you need to do:

• Buy the Super Speedy Plugins Install + Migrate service
• Create a Digital Ocean account and reply to your Super Speedy Plugins order email with your Digital Ocean email address and admin login to the site you wish to migrate (we need this to create a backup). Alternatively, you may upload UpdraftPlus backup files to Google Drive or Dropbox. If your server is larger than 20GB we will need to do a manual migration and will need root SSH access.
• We will build your server and point a temporary domain at it so you can test it
• Once you’re happy with everything we will make the switch so you will have zero downtime.

Creating a Digital Ocean Account

Click here to create a Digital Ocean account (this is an affiliate link of mine, includes a $10 discount for you).

Send us your Digital Ocean email address so we can send your completed snapshot to you. Please also let us know which location you would like your server and which size of droplet you would like. Reply to your Super Speedy Plugins order confirmation if you need help choosing these.