Hi Steven
I am no server boffin, & I dare say others have varying degrees of opinion, but I usually go with a pretty barebones affair in .htaccess with GZIP compression, defining MIME types, custom HTML error pages, URL redirects & rewrites, XSS cross site scripting & SSL HSTS stuff.
Personally I don't cache html,htm,xml,txt,xsl,php,ico,jpg,jpeg,png,gif,js,css,swf,pdf,flv,mp3 - but having stated that it also depends on what is the purpose of the actual site so some of those I list may need some caching.
Some of these sites that are giving, as I call it, 'perfect world recommendations' & thus have people spending (wasting) ages for very litte gain. People end up missing what's actually happening in so far as much as having tweaked this, tweaked that then eventually lost what they were aiming to achieve in the first place.
And also, having a website hosted with a bloody good host, IMHO, is the first consideration. Rubbish foundations = rubbish build
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Steve
Manchester UK
Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.