The secret? I have a lightweight theme with minimal dynamic content, and I use LiteSpeed cache on the server. That's it. Easily handled 20-40 thousand pageviews over a couple of hours.
* blazingly fast for readers with no chance of slowdown
* very low hosting costs
* linkfarmers never steal my content
* I don't have to moderate comments
I recommend this approach to everyone.
Oh well, everything else is true: Blazingly fast, low hosting costs, no comment moderation, etc.
>_<
Don't feel bad about taking your allotted paid time off days and sick days (if you need to) - it is expected that you will disappear for a week or two periodically.
Marmite is supposed to be spread very thinly on buttered toast. Vogels is a good brand of bread for this.
Despite what you might hear on the street, Pavlova is not good.
Want to know the rest? Hey, buy the rights.
And yet that means so many fascinating blogs go unread.
A while back, I scraped the top-level comments from a "dear HN, what's your personal blog" post, and found SO MANY AMAZING BLOGS!
The tool's here: https://random-hn-blog.herokuapp.com
I'd much rather read a small obscure blog with very little traffic (well, any small obscure blog but mine) than something that regularly gets deluges of traffic.
Something about knowing they're writing to a potentially huge audience changes the writing, I think...
This post[0] was #1 on the front page for a day and I had 0 issues serving requests running on the cheapest shared Wordpress hosting with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin enabled.
[0] https://andreschweighofer.com/agile/anxiety-in-product-devel...
I'm starting to think that it's time for people to stop using WordPress+MySQL and move over to something more performant.
I've found it amazing how much you can do these days with even a cheap VPS, and how many requests you can serve as long as you're disciplined about not going overboard with excessive dynamic content and knowing where your scalability pain points are (sometimes this isn't obvious until you really get a lot of traffic!).
What makes MySQL so bad at handling queries? I have never worked with it personally, but it seems like a core feature of a database should be handling many concurrent requests
The software that is used to generate the queries. Inadequate indices, writes on each page load that lock shared tables...
In fact, the database layer is often forgotten when you talk optimization in the WordPress world — page cache is usually seemed as the holy grail, with MySQL left to fend for itself.
I am not saying that implementing page cache is bad — it is essential for WordPress —, just that page cache is not the only thing that matters, but seems to be the go-to solution for performance issues with WordPress, when in reality, you should look at the picture as a whole.
That scenario (in general, not referring specifically to WP anymore) makes database indexing/optimization much more expensive at webhost scale, because you potentially have columns that range in size from empty to 1MB.
That's why most WP users have gone deep down the rabbithole of view-level caching, because optimizing an uncached result is so much harder in that environment.
But if you call yourself a managed WordPress hosting company and your marketing material says your entire stack is optimized for WordPress, you should be held to higher standards than a shared hosting company like HostGator, for example.
Properly tuned, a database is able to handle millions of requests per second.