Camera Animation

 

Welcome to Photoscotland.net

 

Photography by Grant Glendinning

 

Capturing Scotland’s landscape in stunning detail.

 

Prints available including framed, canvas, acrylic, and metal prints.

 

 

 

 

P h o t o s c o t l a n d . n e t

Scottish Landscape Photography

Scottish Landscape Prints

Black and White Photography

Nature Photography

Astrophotography

Fine Art Prints available

 

© www.photoscotland.net 2011. All Rights Reserved.

 

WEBSITE TECH INFORMATION

 

Having used many shared hosting providers over the years, I decided to try a self-managed VPS to have full control over the technologies that run my website.
Although I opted for a £2/month trial for 6 months, during which I could decide whether to continue with the VPS or go back to shared hosting if it didn’t work out for me.

 

That was in October 2021, and after the trial discount, I decided to stick with the VPS from IONUS (Size M). I’m very happy with this VPS and pay only £6/month, which is cheaper than any shared hosting providers I’ve used in the past. Additionally, I get 2 vCores CPU, 2GB RAM, and an 80GB SSD, which for now, is more than enough for this website.

 

Although I had the option to use the Plesk control panel + Linux OS with my IONOS VPS OS installation, I instead opted to use just a Linux OS because I wanted to use OpenLiteSpeed, which Plesk does not support yet. This also meant I would have to use the CyberPanel control panel.

Debian would have been my first choice of OS, but CyberPanel does not support it. Additionally, there are only two control panels that OpenLiteSpeed supports: CyberPanel and DirectAdmin control panels. While OpenLiteSpeed is free, using any other control panel would require purchasing a LiteSpeed license.

 

I tried a version of Ubuntu, but I encountered a lot of errors with this OS when installing CyberPanel. CentOS 7 was my third choice and probably the best choice, as the installation process went smoothly, and I’ve had very few problems since installing it. Any issues that arose were fixed quickly and easily, as there is plenty of information available on the web, including CyberPanel forums.

 

VPS, operating system – Centos 7 Linux (I’ll be installing Almalinux in the near future since support for Centos 7 will stop in a few years)  

UPDATE 17/06/2023  I now have Almalinux8.8  installed as of June 14, 2023.
UPDATE 26/06/2023 I updated to PHP 8.2.7  I also recompiled GD module to enable AVIF function.
UPDATE 14/07/2023  I updated to PHP 8.2.8 and recompiled GD module to enable AVIF function
UPDATE 18/08/2023 Updated to PHP 8.2.9  and recompiled GD module to enable AVIF function
UPDATE 05/10/2023  Updated to PHP 8.2.11 and recompiled GD module to enable AVIF support
UPDATE 22/11/2023  Updated to PHP 8.2.12 and recompiled GD module to enable AVIF support
UPDATE 30/10/2024  Updated to PHP 8.3.10 and recompiled GD module to enable AVIF support

 

The installation went quite smoothly, but I did encounter a few configuration problems afterward, including SSL, HSTS, and databases. Thankfully, I was able to resolve them quite quickly, and I always maintain a complete backup of my files, so I could revert back to the previous OS if needed.

 

This OS is much leaner compared to my previous installation, as it consumes significantly less RAM and file usage than CentOS 7. Additionally, I can now enable a function on a certain PHP module that was not possible with my previous installation.

I’m really pleased with this OS, as it is the ‘forever-free enterprise Linux distribution’ and has security support until 2029.

       PHP 8.3.12          WordPress 6.7.2

For more detailed information on this or any other website, you can check this link here  https://w3techs.com

14/09/2022

I recently did a deep dive into speeding up my site without using any plugins—here’s how I got a perfect PageSpeed score manually.

Grant
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