Ok, I’ve followed some recent posts about the evils of attempting to cache Simplepress, so I’m trying to make sure I’m not doing that.

I’ve just had a bit of a debate with one of my web hosts regarding server-side caching; they assure me that they have no server-side caching enabled (& I don’t have any caching plugins installed).

However, I am getting a grade of “A” on webpagetest.org for “Cache Static Content” when I run it against my site (from a different origin server that has never scanned the site before). This means I am happily browser caching somehow, right?

I move a duplicate copy of my site to another host (different domain name), and when I run webpagetest.org against it, I get an “F” for “Cache Static Content” suggesting it is not facilitating browser caching.

After much debate my first host then tells me that they do have browser caching enabled server-wide (but it isn’t server-side?), and I’ll have to send “no cache” instructions to browsers if I don’t want them to cache it.  Of course, I’m not having to do that at the 2nd host with the same exact code running.

So let me ask: Do I need to abandon my first host because they can’t/won’t disable browser caching?  Unlike page caching, I don’t think user A can see user B’s browser cache, so personal views/protected content isn’t the issue. I would guess the issue would be not seeing updated content timely if revisiting/refreshing a post/page/view?

Kelly