4 Wordpress sites, 1 server – great performance on Digital Ocean with Nginx

I purchased the $40/m plan on DO and started to move my sites over. In the process I learned a whole lot about configuring my own server. I got a pretty impressive setup going now and monitor it on New Relic. It really only took me a few weeks to learn everything and get all my sites stable. It's been several months now and have had to hardly ever login to my server to touch anything. Initially I was worried that I'd have to manage my sites and it'd suck up some of my time but really I'm actually saving time because I don't have to deal with HostGator or going over the limit with WP Engine. I'm saving $110 a month, I learned a whole lot in the process, and it really did not take much time to learn nor is it much of a maintenance at all to run.

Fortunately, I was running nginx and one of the WordPress caching plugins (W3 Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, I forget which) and had spent a fair amount of time trying to tune the whole setup.

The VPS managed to serve ~200k visitors over a period of a few hours without any issues whatsoever. I was pretty amazed since this particular page has a LOT of images (Pingdom's Website test for the page reports 158 requests and 1.4 MB in size).

Nowadays, I run nginx and varnish on a physical server with four 2.2 GHz cores and 16 GB of RAM. It definitely doesn't have any problems keeping up. After the snapchatdb.info site got shut down by their provider, I hosted it for them and served up ~30 TB over a few days.

Also, it's pretty well known that Wordpress is a dog in its standard configuration. Using some sort of caching mechanism is required if you have any kind of traffic to the site (some like W3 Total Cache).

While there are fun benchmarking services like the blitz.io and LoadImpact.com, you can normally get a pretty good feel for how your site will do under a load using "ab" (apache benchmark) from your local machine. This will at least let you test dynamically generated pages to make sure caching is working properly. Plus using some like Google PageSpeed to verify browser caching is properly being enabled by your webserver.

I would, though, add a few words of caution here.

1. It is one thing to put together a VPS to run a bunch of sites. It is another to handle major traffic on it. Some of you have done it, some of you will learn with time how to do it, but a large number won't. If it is critical for your site to be up 24/7 and Google is going to be your best friend in trying to understand which part of the stack is creating the bottleneck, you'll be in for some real trouble.

2. Do you know how to check for rootkits? Would you know if your server has been backdoored? These days attack vectors are so complex that even experienced hands (the main reason why I don't do this on my own anymore) have trouble saying for sure they are fully locked down. Wordpress on a public static IP represents one of the juiciest targets on the web for hackers and a big chunk of the phishing sites are hosted on servers with unpatched Wordpress installations or plugins/themes that have backdoors in them. Most of the site owners have no clue they've been owned till the hosting company takes them down. Please don't wind up being one of those site owners.

If you are going to do this own your own, at least get something like Wordfence installed, so that you have some degree of protection in place.

I run most of my sites these days on Webfaction. I believe they run Cloudlinux these days, which means you get pretty consistent performance from the server, even in the shared hosting environment. The sites with greater resource requirements are moved to Wiredtree, who provide beefier, managed VPS services at reasonable rates as long as you are OK with cPanel and don't veer too much from their standard stack.

Disclosure: I have no business links with Webfaction or Wiredtree.

Of course, all of these are very low traffic sites.

There was definitely a learning curve, especially with nginx and Wordpress. I'm much more of a web developer than a server admin, but once everything got up and running, there's very, very little in terms of day to day maintenance.

I used to be on a shared host but also ran into issues with memory and general downtime. Not to mention there is something liberating about having your own (virtual) box.

My main personal website is on dreamhost, and I have been using them since about 06, and they are great for simple domain controls, but I really like DO because I like having root, and having snapshots if I jack something up.

I personally like to be involved as far down the stack as I can get (to gain some experience) -- great read. Also, I recommend INIZ, they're pretty cheap (~9GBP/month), and offer pretty stable service.

I think Wordpress is big and bloated, but it sure is easy to use.

Further, the real resource jump comes from 0 to 1 Wordpress sites. 1 to 4 is simply the overhead of handling connections. No new Apache or mysql processes are needed...

I have upgraded to the 10$ instance, and still could barely navigate in the wp admin area..

This took 2-3 days, now the site looks to be ok (traffic has dropped to 150 day), i think it was a memory issue with their server..

Also if i do a : ab -n 500 -c 200 http://site.com from another server my site stops working..

full config and details are all here. Not sure since this post really doesn't actually share much, but I think my performance was a lot better.

http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2013/08/29/reverse-proxy-and-ca...