How to enable caching on Turbo Web Hosting

This article describes how to enable caching on a Turbo Boost or Turbo Max Web Hosting account.

Enabling caching

By default, caching is disabled on Turbo Boost and Turbo Max Web Hosting accounts. To enable caching for your account, you use directives in an .htaccess file. These directives enable you to control precisely which types of content the Turbo Boost or Turbo Max Web Hosting server caches, and for how long. You should create the .htaccess file in the base folder for the application that you want to cache.

The following sample configuration demonstrates how to enable caching on a Turbo Boost or Turbo Max Web Hosting account:

<IfModule LiteSpeed>
    CacheEnable public
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^GET|HEAD$
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !login|admin|register|post|cron
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !nocache
    RewriteRule .* - [E=Cache-Control:max-age=300]
</IfModule>

Let's go through this example configuration line by line:

• The first line checks to make sure the Turbo Boost or Turbo Max Web Hosting server is running LiteSpeed.
  Strictly speaking, you do not have to use this line (and its corresponding line at the end of the file), but it is good practice to do so, particularly if you use the .htaccess file on a different server in the future.
• The second line enables the public cache. Turbo Boost and Turbo Max Web Hosting servers have a public and private cache. Usually, you want to use the public cache, which caches content for multiple clients. The private cache is used to cache content for a single client (for example, personal information for an authorized user).
• The third line turns on URL rewrite functionality. Turbo Boost and Turbo Max Web Hosting servers use rewrite conditions and rules to control caching behavior.
• The fourth, fifth, and sixth lines use RewriteCond directives to specify what should and should not be cached. The REQUEST_METHOD condition instructs the server to cache GET and HEAD requests, but not POST requests. The REQUEST_URI condition, because it begins with an exclamation mark (!), instructs the server to not cache any page whose URL contains login, admin, register, post, or cron.
  To add additional strings to the REQUEST_METHOD or REQUEST_URI conditions, use the pipe symbol (|) to separate them.
• The QUERY_STRING configuration line enables you to see the non-cached version of any page by adding nocache to a query string in the URL. For example, to view the non-cached version of http://example.com/mypage, you could add ?any_field=any_value&nocache to the end of the URL.
• The RewriteRule directive actually sets the cache duration. In this example, pages are cached for five minutes (300 seconds).

X-LiteSpeed-Cache: hit

More Information

For detailed information about caching behavior on a server running LiteSpeed, please visit http://www.litespeedtech.com/support/wiki/doku.php?id=litespeed_wiki:litespeed:cache.