WooCommerce Developer in Manchester

woocommerce logo image

In case you didn’t know (and why would you unless you were already watching us?), Silicon Dales opened an office in Manchester in August 2017. About Silicon Dales Silicon Dales is a distributed team of WordPress and WooCommerce developers, who work on complex open source projects for small, medium and larger enterprises. Silicon Dales are …

Read more

Installing XCache on Amazon EC2

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 …

Read more

Adding a User to AWS with CloudFront permissions

If you want to allow someone else (like a contractor, or Silicon Dales) to access your AWS account to add CloudFront to act as a CDN for your WordPress website (and why wouldn’t you, its a great way to offload static content, and can even be free for your first year under the free usage …

Read more

How to Safely Update Linux in AWS EC2 Micro Instance – Using Yum

Often, when logging into via SSH to an Amazon EC2 instance, you are told that there are several updates (usually including security updates) waiting to be updated on your system. The panel on Amazon Linux even goes so far as to explain how one might go about updating to this version. HOWEVER, as this may …

Read more

How to Setup FTP (FTPS (not SFTP)) on an AWS EC2 Instance

Below are the commands required to setup FTP (well, FTPS in fact, and specifically not SFTP, which you can most easily use by adding your security certificate to your FTP program and accessing over SSH) on your AWS EC2 cloud instance. I’m assuming you use the AWS flavour of Linux. If you do not use …

Read more

How to setup WordPress & WooCommerce on AWS using Cloudways

This guide is intended to show how to setup a WordPress and WooCommerce installation on Cloudways (a managed cloud hosting panel, which does most of the “heavy lifting” when it comes to setting up all the necessary components to run a cloud hosted web application). It contains our Cloudways referal link and also there’s our …

Read more

AWS EC2 Instance Won’t Stop

If you use a lot – or even just one – EC2 instance on Amazon Web Services (AWS), from time-to-time, you might find that an instance becomes unresponsive, you can’t get in via SSH, and, when in the AWS console, the instance just won’t stop! When this happens, you select “Stop” in the console, and …

Read more