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Comment by leesalminen | Hacker News Reader

How much did you charge to rewrite WordPress in elixir though?

I'm obviously not going to reveal actual numbers, but it's safe to they spent less than what they would have spent being on Wordpress for the remainder of the year. Time to completion is 3 months. No new "feature" development was blocked. Remember - this is a content website (Wordpress is mostly used for content AFAIK and less for building features).

The moment it was done, we just switched nameservers. It had no impact on client's workflow or day to day life.

If it was a content website on Wordpress, couldn't Cloudflare's $5/mo APO have done the job? It static caches the site at the edge. You'd get almost a 100% hit rate unless there are strange requirements.

edit: Adding link with info about Cloudflare's APO product https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004982231...

yes it could, but it's not webscale!

gotta use aws

Well to be fair he is an Elixir consultant so he rewrote it in Elixir.

APO is not a drop in to make what better, there are alot of kinks, and you could spend as much in dev time to get that working right. YMMV.

It can be a drop in (it was for my sites), but it depends on the requirements

Good suggestion, but if your content site is a news site, then homepage and certain category pages require by the second updates. Cloudflare unfortunately can't help and all the requests are directly hitting your database at that point. That forces you to get an expensive MySQL instance to sustain that kind of traffic.

Cloudflare will automatically purge the cache when you update or publish an article. Also from my understanding of APO, the cache will get distributed to all their edge locations without each one needing to hit the origin server. So if you update an article it would only get fetched a few times max until it gets updated again. That seems pretty good. Also as far as MySQL, you could install a Redis cache in front. Personally we use Varnish and Memcached as additional layers in front of Cloudflare (it works out of the box with Cloudways)

And how big was the risk to have the invested time wasted? How long did you block new feature developement?

Safe to say they would've gone out of business if they kept burning that kind of money for the remainder of the year. This was around covid era, they didn't have a solid revenue stream from the traffic they got.

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