Everyone wants their blog to be popular. Really popular.

The first problem is of course to become really popular. It’s not an easy thing to do.

The second problem comes in if you become too popular. Showing all those blog posts will soon bring your web server to its knees.

But fear not, dear WordPress blogger, there is a simple five-minute solution to this. And best of all, it’s free!

This blog has been on the front page of Digg and other social media sites several times, and as a result received some serious peaks in traffic. Still, we didn’t have any issues. How come?

Cache, cache, cache!

The single largest performance bottleneck of a WordPress blog is the MySQL database access that takes place behind the scenes. The key to a blog that can handle anything you throw at it, including being on the front page of Digg or Slashdot, is page caching.

Fortunately for you, others before you have thought of this and have made it easy to add page caching to WordPress. This eliminates 99% of the calls to the MySQL, and really speeds up your blog.

Caching with WP-Cache

We use a WP plugin called WP-Cache. Since it’s saved our bacon quite a few times, we thought it was only fair that we mentioned it.

Just follow the instructions on the WP-Cache homepage. You will be up and running in no time.

That’s it. You’re set, and ready for the front page of Digg. Good luck!

In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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