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Comment by Dachande663 | Hacker News Reader

WordPress is like the Kalashnikov of the web. You can use it for pretty much anything, run it anywhere, do god knows what to it and it'll still happy hum along (albeit behind a very big varnish cache).

A few of our clients have millions of pageviews running off of a couple t2.small instances and the single biggest factor for them is the UI and the security of knowing they're not tied into a bespoke platform.

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If everything is cached, sure, serving static content is cheap. The comparison with a solid machine I find it funny, a bad update in a plug-in can render your site useless for a while and WP's security record is abysmal.

An argument to be made is that it's security record is due strictly to its popularity. Given the choice between the 1000 pound gorilla that everyone uses and has double digit CVEs released every year, and the unknown that nobody uses, I'm going to pick the first one simply because the second one likely has just as many holes - there's just not enough people trying to attack it.

And there are enough users - both well-informed and not - that when a vulnerability is discovered, it's more likely to be fixed and deployed quickly.

Wordpress has improved a lot since version 3, and most of the vulnerabilities you see for it now require some kind of privilege escalation or don't really give the attacker a whole lot to work with (http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2337/...). And Wordpress handles updates remarkably well, including automatically installing security updates in the background.

I previously hated Wordpress because it was a source of so much trouble on the web, but now I sort of grudgingly appreciate it. I still don't enjoy having to work with it on occasion for clients, but it doesn't make me grind my teeth anymore.

We have clients running multisite with 150MM+ page views per month but on dedicated hardware and Varnish running in front of it. The latter is a must in a setup like this. You save on MRC for server rentals, which is a huge value proposition.

what kind of costs are involved?

I run a community site that does 1m pv's a month and growing but we get hammered on 'breaking news' as wp-super-cache does not seem to handle post updates well under high use thus interested in possible solutions or alternatives.

It's roughly $90/mo for 1m+ pvs/mo (includes management). With wp-super-cache you're still hitting PHP/MySQL (although not as heavily if you're pulling everything cold).

Whereas with Varnish you're getting hot pages off RAM and on you go.

able to email me company url / more info? email in profile

They are talking about Varnish:

https://www.varnish-cache.org

Or, you can start with this to get the general idea first:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varnish_software

Your email isn't visible in your profile. But mine is. Email me anytime.

wordpress, and a t2.micro can handle >1 million pageviews?

with a cache sure. static content is easy to serve.

nginx + varnish + cdn + pagespeed + php-apc. Most definately possible and you will still have 400+mb memory to spare on a 1gb server, avg cpu usage is at 30-40%. Done it for few clients myself.

My test server delivered 3.9 Million pageviews per hour with similar setup[1]

http://nestify.io/benchmarks/

Yup, WordPress keeps on chugging along. And for most publishing needs it's good enough, regardless of what's inside: https://janit.wordpress.com/2015/10/18/does-the-technical-de...

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