How to Use Lithium Hosting With WPEngine
Lithium is a lightweight, open source platform designed for fast and secure web hosting. It was originally built for DigitalOcean, a company that provides affordable dedicated servers hosting for companies and individuals who need a fast and reliable web host.
If you’re looking for a simple and clean platform for your business or personal website, you can’t go wrong with Lithium. It’s incredibly popular in the WordPress community, and for good reason: it’s simple to use, and it offers some great benefits.
This guide will tell you everything you need to know about using Lithium with WPEngine, including how to get the best performance out of your site.
Features
Lithium’s greatest strength is that it’s extremely lightweight. The whole platform only takes up about a megabyte of space, which is minuscule compared to other paid web hosts. This makes it great for mobile and desktop devices alike. It also has a small memory footprint, so it doesn’t bog down your device.
Another great thing about Lithium is that it offers a lot of features, all of which are free. There’s no onboarding costs or any other hidden fees. Some of the features that Lithium offers include free backups, free domain privacy, free custom website themes, and a free CDN (content delivery network).
You might be wondering, however, if some of these features are worthwhile. After all, a lot of hosts out there don’t offer anything else aside from hosting, so why should you pay for more than just that? The answer is simple: it’s all about the tools and the support you get.
Lithium offers some great tools that can help you make your site faster and more secure. Some of the features that make it stand out from the crowd are:
- NGINX/1 ((2))
- PHP 7.0 ((2))
- MySQL ((4))
- SSH ((2))
Let’s take a look at each one.
NGINX/1
You might already use NGINX for your web server, and it’s the strongest competitor to the Apache web server. If not, you should consider using it. The most popular and powerful version of NGINX is NGINX/1, which was originally designed for WordPress. That’s because WordPress itself is built on top of NGINX.
The best part is that NGINX/1 is completely free. There are no fees whatsoever.
You’ll notice that when you install NGINX/1 on your server, there’s no configuration file to tweak. That’s because the whole platform is managed via a control panel called Caddy.
This means that you can just log in, and within minutes you’ll have a fully functioning NGINX server.
What are the benefits of using NGINX for your web server? Well, let’s take a quick look:
- Security: As we mentioned before, WordPress is built on top of NGINX, so it’s very secure. If you’re looking for a secure web host, you should consider NGINX.
- Speed: Another great thing about NGINX is that it’s lightning fast. It’s also very lightweight, which makes it great for mobile devices. These are important factors in making a site speed faster.
- Scalability: With the growth of mobile traffic, it’s important to have a web host that can scale with you. That’s why most hosts will charge you a bit more for performance boosting features.
- Reliability: Finally, one of the most important things to consider when choosing a web host is their reliability. You want a host that you can rely on, and that will not disappoint you. They should be able to give you the reliability you’re looking for.
PHP 7.0
If you’re using PHP at all, then you should be running at least version 7.0. PHP 7.0 is the latest version of the PHP programming language, and it offers some great improvements over older versions. As a result, a lot of the previous advantages of running PHP on your site can be attributed to PHP 7.0.
For instance, PHP 7.0 makes it much easier to use object-oriented programming in your applications, and it has many new built-in functions. It also has some great features that make code more readable, like the the strict and loose comparison operators, the hexadecimal string representation, and the eval() function.
You should consider PHP 7.0 if you’re looking for a better performing web host. PHP 7.0 offers a number of significant improvements over previous versions, so it’s definitely worth looking into.
MySQL
If you have a database that you need to connect to your site, then you should consider using the MySQL database engine. It’s one of the most popular open source databases around, and it’s what most people use to store their WordPress databases. That’s because MySQL is incredibly easy to use, and it’s quite powerful.
You’ll notice that with MySQL, there’s virtually no configuration needed. You just have to connect to the database, and you can start adding and removing users and data as you please. That’s great if you’re a bit of a database guru, but for most people that means just connecting to the database and using it. It’s incredibly reliable too, which should make you feel a bit more comfortable hosting your site on it.
SSH
SSH (Secure Shell) is a cryptographic protocol that ensures secure communication between two parties. That means that SSH can be used to securely transfer files, as well as for remote management of servers via a terminal session.
If you have a BitTorrent Sync account, you can use the built-in SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) to securely upload and download files to and from your web host. This is a very convenient feature for people using WordPress, who will notice significant performance improvements when transferring large files.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of servers that distribute content (files, videos, and so on) across the internet. When a browser requests a resource (for example, a web page or an image) from a CDN, the CDN will route the request to the nearest server, which will then retrieve the resource, compress it, and send it back to the browser.
This process is known as content distribution, and it’s how CDNs improve the performance of websites and other content-heavy applications because it reduces the strain on your web host. When a request is made for a resource, the CDN will start looking for the nearest server in order to deliver the content as quickly as possible.
A CDN will also help make your site more visible to search engines. When a search engine like Googlebot crawls your site, it will discover and index the content, including images, videos, and so on. When a visitor then makes a search query, they will be directed to your site because it is the most relevant result for their search.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a fast, reliable, and secure web host, then you can’t go wrong with WPEngine. Not only do they offer all of those things, but they also back it up with great support, plus they’re extremely affordable. If you’re planning to use WordPress for your web projects, then WPEngine is definitely worth a look.