After a small incident with a shared host, I moved my phpBB forum and a few other static sites to a VPS running on nginx. Nginx is a small, lightweight but very efficient web server created by Igor Sysoev, originally developed for www.rambler.ru, Russia’s second-largest web site. Due to it’s light-weightedness and efficiency, it is used by a lot of high traffic sites like WordPress, Hulu, Github, Ohloh, SourceForge, TorrentReactor, etc. After moving to Nginx, I noticed a significant improvement in page load times. The pages on the site load in around 0.0X seconds now, as reported by the phpBB’s measurement system. The pages also seem to be snappier as compared to the time when I was on Litespeed.
I recently noticed that apart for the decrease in page loading time, the activity of Googlebot has increased manyfold. Here’s a screen-shot of the report from Google Webmaster Tools :
More recently, I moved this blog to the VPS running on Nginx, and I have not been disappointed. This blog is running on WordPress 3.0.1, with no caching plugins. The posts seem to load faster than ever, as evident from this Google Webmaster Tools report :
I couldn’t be more happy.
PS: Of course, some of the speed improvement can be attributed to the fact that I moved from a shared server to a VPS, but that doesn’t undermine the awesomeness that is Nginx.