I put a CentOS 7 x64 server online for working on CompTIA Linux+. I decided to install WordPress and start developing my websites on it.
I tried numerous times on Ubuntu 16.04.4 to get WordPress to install without success. So I decided to place it on my CentOS 7 x64 server. I installed LAMP and upgraded PHP to 7.x to fix a WordPress crop issue. Check out the Linux – CentOS 7 page for details on the installation of LAMP and WordPress
7.19.18: I installed the free version of elementor. It adds tools that can create columns and other features. Helps with formatting the pages better.
7.29.2018: WordPress is running on 4 vCPUs ,12GB of RAM and 588GB storage thin provisioned. I have videos from my children that were over 600 MB in size. WordPress by default is 2 MB upload size. So I changed it to 512 MB and now 768 MB.
The ServerAlias is the old www address. The redirect points to the new SSL server address. The redirect is much faster now since it happens in the website itself.
Building the WordPress server was not an easy task.
Installing LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP was a pain. I wanted to start with the latest versions of MySQL Maria DB and PHP. You can see that information on other pages on this site. Next, because wp-admin and wp-login can’t be blocked from the internet without a $300 a year WP firewall plugin. I needed to buy a Godaddy cert for each web site and setup my firewall to do SSL inspection along with locking down the ports to it. I am still trying to lock it down so only a VPN connection inside the firewall can access it. I needed to install CentOS 7 64-bit and make sure /var/www had enough space for the 4 web sites. WordPress is a space hog. The Media Library creates 12 copies of each picture you upload to it. Next, it stores them in year / Month format. So I used Add from Server plugin to upload my children’s pictures based on the actual date. My web site wp.michaelmckenney.com is 15% larger than before. The media library did it. I have hundreds of videos of my children. I ended up placing them in a directory by year and date for uploading and placing direct links on the pages for them. Embedding videos in WordPress will cause performance issues.
WordPress is slower than HTML/CSS for page loading. It uses PHP. Much slower. I tossed 4 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM at it. It uses 340 MB of RAM. I am going to buy a cache plugin to see if it helps. The only benefit of WordPress so far is how fast you can create pages and image galleries. Elementor and Conditional Menu plugins do help.
The Ubuntu WordPress server still needs the Godaddy SSL certificate to be able to start building websites on it. I am creating a wp.pandjmckenneyfamily.com web site and moving all the family stuff off wp.michaelmckenney.com to it. I moved it to the Ubuntu server to split the load up between the two VMWare datastores on my HP DL360e Gen8 server. I used JAlbum for most of this content. So moving and linking it will be easier than recreating the media library.
Creating and organizing the pages in WordPress took some thought. Each of the 4 websites have different needs. The menus needed to work better on mobile. devices. Pictures for our family web sites needed to be better organized. My brother’s web site needed to cover every aspect of his work. My political blog page has pictures I cut and paste to Facebook. I also cut and paste what I have written and paste that to Facebook.
