Great big honking disclaimer: All opinions, views, etc. are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer, Memset Ltd.
We host a lot of WordPress sites at work, and I’ve been using WordPress myself for a good number of years.
When Memset first introduced their Memstore® product a couple of years ago, the very first thing I did was to optimise managing director Kate Craig-Wood’s personal blog – katescomment.com – to use it. One way of doing this was to offload as much of the blog’s static content from the server onto Memstore®.
To do this I used a WordPress plugin called W3 Total Cache. It’s a free plugin that offers a variety of optimisation techniques (caching and content delivery network support) to help improve performance of your WordPress blog.
Memstore® is rather unique in comparison to most other OpenStack Swift providers in that it offers an FTP and SFTP proxy interface to the underlying object storage system. While W3 Total Cache provides support for FTP CDNs, using this with Memstore® requires that you go through more layers than is absolutely necessary. There are many good reasons to use Swift natively wherever possible.
During the early days of PHP Cloudfile support, it was difficult to get things working with anything other than Rackspace. But since then many changes have been made to the PHP Cloudfiles libraries, OpenStack Swift, and even Memstore®, and now W3 Total Cache can be made to upload content directly to Memstore® natively.
It requires a small change to the the following file:
/wp-content/plugins/w3-total-cache/lib/CF/cloudfiles.php
Change the value for UK_AUTHURL to point to https://auth.storage.memset.com.
For example:
define(“UK_AUTHURL”, “https://auth.storage.memset.com”);
Once done, login to your WordPress dashboard, head over to Performance an ensure that the CDN type is set to:
Rackspace Cloud Files
then go to the CDN page and fill in the details of your Memstore® credentials and container.
Make sure you set the region to UK – this will ensure that the correct URL is used with Memstore and not Rackspace.
Clik here to view.
Click to enlarge
If you need help setting up the CDN side of a Memstore® container, Memset have a help page here.
It’d be nice if W3 Total Cache could be updated so that it allowed the values for the AUTHURL can be changed through the plugin’s WordPress Dashboard interface rather than hacking around the plugin library files.
Oh, and Memstore recently won Best Cloud Storage Product at the inaugural 2014 UK Clouds Awards.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
