update after i rebooted my linode the page load time decreased to 2 secs, which is on par with what i had at siteground. i did enable cloudflare, which doesnt seem to have made a difference. i've also experiemented using cloudfront for my cdn and that actually increased my load time/page speed. so i've disabled that. i tried to enable caching with nginx/fastcgi but didnt get it to work yet. any other suggestions ?
