W3 Total Cache speeds up page load times in various ways.
It can be installed via the WordPress plugin installer.
Once the plugin is installed there will be a new side bar option in the WordPress dashboard, select:
Performance > General Settings
Scroll to the bottom of that page and use the upload settings function to push the appropriate settings file up to the website.
After experimentation the configurations that seem best for Rackspace Cloudsites and TPP Cloud hosting are attached in the files below. These configurations are not setup to use and CDN (Content Delivery Network).
W3 Total Cache Config for TPP Cloud
W3 Total Cache Config for Rackspace Cloudsites
The next two files have the added setting of sitemap_index.xml for the sitemap location, to make that work properly though the wpseo plugin by yoast needs to be installed.
W3 Total Cache Config for TPP Cloud with Sitemap
W3 Total Cache Config for Rackspace Cloudsites with Sitemap
CDN Configuration needs to be done manually since a container name needs to be entered.
The configuraton file for TPP seems to work ok for CPanel hosting on a VPS too.
If you wanted to test the page speed factors then use
developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
One thing that is worth keeping in mind is that these tools are very fine detail and tend to pickup things that you might not have much control over like optimisation of embedded videos or files
Once you have the caching setup and start browsing your site you should notice it runs much faster, it will feel quicker.
One of the keys to speed improvement which W3 Total Cache handles nicely is the gzip compression of files as they are sent to the browser, you can get a sense of why this is important here:
devdm.com/blog/how-to-use-gzip-compression-to-get-your-google-pagespeed-score-higher/
Here is a fun little video to explain how website compression works: