We’ve been benchmarking Amazon EC2 server instances for some highly complicated PHP applications over the past week. During this time, we’ve discovered that XCache is perhaps the best opcode caching product for our purposes. If anyone would like a walkthrough for installing XCache on an Amazon EC2 instance, simply leave a comment below and we …
We often install WordPress as a CMS for businesses at Silicon Dales, because we know how important it is for companies and small firms to communicate with their customers and clients. This does, however, introduce the business web manager to a new thing: moderating comments; and comment moderation’s ugly sister – Comment Spam! A lot …
We like to use the Silicon Dales blog to answer questions we get asked, in a public place, so that others, who are asking the same questions (and typing them into search engines) will land here, and discover the answer. One question we are frequently asked is “can you get a news section of your …
The mobile web is here, and it doesn’t look like it is going anywhere fast, now, does it?! So you probably want to make your company website look good on an Apple iPhone, iPad, or Google Android Handset? Well, the good news for people who use WordPress to manage their web content is that there …
This is a question we are asked by people on a regular basis: “Why is my website slow?” The answer provided here, since 2012, is generally speaking in a WordPress context – because we are WP specialists – but a lot of the rules will apply to really any website, particularly one which runs on …
For business, time is money, so any time saved can equal money in the bank. We know this, at Silicon Dales, so we build websites that work, quickly. We also know that the computer should be doing a lot of the hard work, even when you are trying to communicate your messages to your clients, …
A lot of businesses are now using video as a means of communicating with clients and customers. We, at Silicon Dales, fully advocate this. It is a great way to reach out to clients in a way they enjoy. Not everyone has the time – or the will – to read through your company messages, …
Most people who come to us with a business looking for a website want to know how to get their site into those Google Maps of the area, complete with their site URL. Luckily for you, its really quite simple to do this, all you need to do is fill out a simple form – …
A number of people have asked us this question over the years, particularly since we have placed a couple of really popular websites into the highly popular news search engine that Google has: Google News. On several websites we have designed and built the backend processes which tell Google News what to index. Specifically, this …
This is a post for those sysadmins out there who run into problems running servers with a LAMP setup. This issue will crop up occasionally in AWS Linux, on EC2 instances, but its a common error on Linux systems running apache as a web server. Occasionally, for some reason or another – usually because you …
