Caching options and modules

Question

My guess is that many ppl like me make Drupal websites just by using modules and simple CSS. Several content types, taxonomies, views, panels or DS to get results fast and more/less nice looking. Maybe add forum to all that.

When it comes to caching there are many options and i have no idea which ones to use. All my websites are on shared hosting (most popular ones).

In "performance" i always enable everything. Minimum cache lifetime and expiration of cached pages are options i always gaze at for several minutes and in the end choose "1 day". No idea if thats good. All other check boxes are clicked of course.

Views 3 are cached by default, nice, if i remember good i had to enable that in previous versions.

Now the fun part is picking modules from drupal.org for caching.

On this page Caching: Modules that make Drupal scale (updated 2014-07-09) we have 15 modules for D7. How many to use ? Which ones are "best" ? Which one you reccomend for shared hosting ? Should i for example disable default caching in performance and in views if i use those ?

So the final question would be: For nondevelopers who use shared hosting, what are the easiest/best modules - plugnplay.

Answer 1

I have usually used the Boost module. It provides a lot of functionality and works really well, but can be a bit to set up since many times you have to modify .htaccess files when rules changes are made. I've used Boost for many sites where Varnish or some other server-side solution was not available and the results were satisfactory. Keep in mind that boost will not work when authenticated --- in fact many caching solutions will not. But Boost does have other modules to help cache authenticated pages for users.