Server Tools
Amazon Web Services
The easiest way to scale your website/app
New Relic
Monitor your entire stack – php, python, mysql, more
WebPageTest.org
An amazing, free web performance testing tool
Pingdom
Server uptime/latency monitoring
Monitor.us
Server uptime/latency monitoring
Blitz.io
Load testing tool
Memcached
mod_spdy, mod_pagespeed, mod rewrite cheatsheet, worker vs prefork
Varnish – reverse caching proxy
Some useful VCLs: set hit/miss header, cache adwords traffic, prevent hotlinking, serve old cache on 5xx errors, block malicious bots
Some useful tutorials
Setup fail2ban to block malicious ssh login attempts
nginx
High concurrency webserver, also very useful as a reverse caching proxy.
Cloudflare
Tough to summarize, hosted dns, reverse caching proxy with anti DoS features
Paper Trail
convenient logging of system info