I was digging around my server tidying things up, and I found I had a huge www-data mail file. I took a look into the file and found it was full of bounces from emails sent from sites I host to users, whose email address did not exist or there were issues.

There are 1,001 pages on the web for hints, tips and advice about starting off as a freelance web developer - or freelance anything to be honest, and they are so much better than anything I can spout off on.  But I have been freelance for nearly 5 years now, developing many different projects for a wide range of clients, and would like to pass on some hints and tips that I've learnt (often the hard way) over the years.

I've come across a couple of very cool tips to decrease the loading time of webpages to the browser using Apache 2.  They only take a few minutes to do and make your pages up to 50% quicker to load, which is never a bad thing.  They also decrease the traffic between your users and your server.

It's taken me a few years to refine this, but this is the method I suggest for effectively backing up both your web server and your local machine.

You'll need command line access to your remote server running a flavour of linux, a PC (of course) and an external hard drive big enough to fit your files on and space on your local machine to store backup files.

Most projects I undertake involve integrating php based websites with other systems. The reasons for doing so are varied but most work has the intention of automating a process that would have to be done either offline or with a delay. The whole point of the Internet as an end-user is to allow users to perform tasks simply and as quickly as possible.