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Quick and dirty .htaccess for small personal sites

jess unrein on October 29, 2018

I host my personal site on a shared Dreamhost instance. I like it because it's relatively inexpensive, I have low traffic, and I'm not doing anythi...

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tux0r • Oct 29 '18

If you're attracting a lot of traffic and/or having difficulties with high load on your server, you probably should move to a VPS where you have root access and use the main server configuration.

And you probably should move away from the Apache web server which does not scale well - and then you won't have a .htaccess file anyway.

jess unrein • Oct 29 '18

Definitely, if you're working on a project where web server performance is very important, rather than just a dinky link dump like my personal site, Apache is probably something you should move on from. But I'm assuming that if you're working on that kind of scaling problem, you're not looking to fix small problems here and there with an .htaccess file.

Propelled • Oct 30 '18 • Edited

What would you recommend moving away from Apache to?

PS. Really great article. Thanks for putting this together. I found it helpful and I am sure so many more will too.

jess unrein • Oct 30 '18

NGINX (pronounced "engine x") has a more robust feature set for dynamic content and is more performant at scale.

There are definitely pros and cons to each solution, and the amount you "feel" the difference between them will largely depend on how complex your site is and what your scaling needs are.

Here's a good side by side comparison from the beginning of this year, if you're trying to decide which solution is right for you.

Carly Ho 🌈 • Oct 30 '18

Okay, I definitely learned something today, because I had no clue how NGINX was pronounced, haha

Mike • Dec 2 '20

I am trying to convert dirty URLs (pages.php?id=2) to a clean URL (pages/2) and I have been able to do that but I am getting "Page not found" errors. This is what I am using now (RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ pages.php?page=$1). Does anyone have a better solution? I have been all over the web looking for a fix but haven't found anything that works.

jess unrein • Dec 3 '20

It's been a bit since I've looked at this, but I can try to see if I can find you problem later today. Let me know if you arrive at a solution before I do!

Guntbert Reiter • Nov 18 '18

I really like how you provide a view of the surroundings of any command you use - what it is about, why you would use it (or not), the specifics of parameters....