It's no coincidence the title of this video corresponds with exactly what you're probably trying to do with your Drupal site. Squeeze every bit of performance you can from whatever server you're on. Shared hosting, dedicated box, virtual server, you name it. So how does the mere Drupal user or admin get stellar performance out of Drupal?

It turns out, the tried and true method for the fastest web page response is simply allowing the web server to spit back a simple html page - just like the good old days of Web 1.0.

Now, Drupal is a complex Content Management System with years of personal investment by many talented and enterprising minds. It has a feature rich database with many creative optimizations in place.

But, guess what, as cool and addictive as Drupal is, you still can't beat that simple HTML web page! So, if you can't beat 'em - then join 'em. That's exactly what the Boost module does. It's a module for Drupal which can increase the speed of your Drupal site SIGNIFICANTLY!

Unless you already know how to install and use memcached or you're REALLY cool and can wrap your brain around using EC2 and Pantheon or comfortable with a Drupal fork such as Pressflow, then Boost is the way to go - especially if you're running on a server you don't directly control.

Boost won't save your bacon if you've got thousands of authenticated users (you need the other solutions above), but for every one of those content-based anonymous-traffic web sites running on Drupal. You simply can't ignore Boost and its Drupal performance enhancements!