Ask HN: My site can't handle meaningful traffic. Help? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: My site can't handle meaningful traffic. Help?

11 pointsDanLivesHere5 comments

I'm looking for a company which can manage the hosting of my websites -- someone who can keep them up when one of them hits the front page of reddit. Twice this week, I've gotten there, and twice, I've been effectively offline.

The site which keeps crumbling is a Cloudflare enabled (but I've probably screwed that up) Wordpress install running one of the preferred caching extensions. So the problem is either my hosting provider (Lunarpages) and/or my total inexperience here, and probably both with an emphasis on the latter. But there are two or three other projects on the server as well, plus a number of mothballed ones that I'm keeping available.

I'm willing to pay for this, of course. I'm paying Lunarpages for a dedicated server (and too much, at that) would gladly move at this point. And I'm not well versed, to say the least, in these issues, so I do not really think doing it myself is an option.

Advice welcome.

Remove W3TC and replace it with WP Super Cache. Verify that the .htaccess rules are installed correctly through their test and ensure that the W3TC rules are removed completely.

Most caching ignores surfers with cookies (i.e. logged in users) which then points to the plugins you might be using when logged-in surfers visit your site. Category with counts, Tag Cloud, the Post Calendar are the three most expensive queries in wordpress. WP-Statpress is also a huge performance problem - you can just put indexes on the tables to get reasonable performance out of it. Some of the related posts plugins are problematic as well.

Profile the site, figure out which plugins contribute to the problems, see if there are better/acceptable replacements.

You're paying at least $109 a month right? That's kinda shocking that it's down all the time.

How many hits are we talking about? Like 50k? More?

If you have multiple sites, have you considered hosting directly through Wordpress.com VIP Hosting? The cost is a bit steep starting at $2,500 for up to 5 wordpress installs but they seem to handle a lot of high traffic sites well. The other option could be to host some of the resources like images and static content on Amazon S3. I'm not knowledgeable enough on WP to know whether it's the server of the way your site is set up.

Hey Dan, drop me an email I can definitely help you out. I run a hosting company tailored for high traffic wp sites (im a contributor to WP) for some extremely high traffic Wordpress blogs. Message me at TwoGiraffes.com

Have you looked at http://wpengine.com ?

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