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So just like any other indie developer, I ran a small personal Wordpress blog on a HostGator shared plan to show case projects and notes.

Now, let's say you have an article that is randomly picked up on HackerNews or Digg, how do you config your Wordpress or the Shared Hosting to survive the sudden surge in visitors and page hits?

I have looked into a few things like: making that article a static page, turn on caching so the page can serve without querying MySQL. Would love to hear from your experience.

Khoi Tran
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3 Answers3

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I would start with a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache. It has the same effect as the first technique you mentioned, but it does it automatically.

If you want better performance for a few pennies more a month, try Amazon Cloudfront. It is a little more setup, but the benefits are well worth it. I set up my DNS to point to Cloudfront, so all traffic hits their edge servers first. Then I set up my server as origin.domain.com and make sure that cache control headers are set (e.g. max-age=3600). When visitors come to my site, they hit the Cloudfront edge server nearest them (there are 22 locations worldwide), and if the page is cached, my server never gets hit. If not, 1 request is made, and for the next hour, all requests are served from the cache on the edge server.

Bryan Young
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  • ah, I will definitely give Amazon Cloudfront a shot. I have a basic understanding of DNS set up, but do you have any guide on how to do the exact set up you mentioned? (especially the part about origin.domain.com and max-age header) So essentially CloudFront will cache the entire URL, even if the blog post may be generated dynamically with URL_REWRITE config for SEO purposes? Oh and would that approach affect my SEO? one last question: can you ballpark how many requests I can survive with W3 Total Cache? – Khoi Tran Jan 03 '13 at 18:42
  • [Using CNAME on Cloudfront](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/CNAMEs.html). Here's an overview: point www.domain.com to your Cloudfront distro. Create a CNAME for origin.domain.com to point to your hostgator account (this can also be a DNS A record pointing to an IP address). Point your Cloudfront distro to origin.domain.com – Bryan Young Jan 03 '13 at 19:08
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As has been already mentioned, a caching plugin is a must. A CDN helps also for media and static files like js and css, and then your theme is also a crucial factor in your site's performance. Keep it clean, minimize queries, and try to avoid frameworks and the overhead they introduce.

I don't use a cdn, but I have a virtual server where I use Nginx to listen on port 80. It also serves the easy stuff like images, text files, stylesheets, etc. Anything more difficult (wordpress content), it passes on to Apache which listens on a different port. Apache is an awesome webserver but it is a beast as far as resources go. If you have 20 items on a page that need loading, and you can have something svelte like Nginx handle 19 of them, it helps tremendously.

Here is an old optimization article I wrote about a year ago - that might help a bit more also: http://trioniclabs.com/2011/12/my-take-on-wordpress-optimization/

Good luck.

Ed Burns
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I also host with HostGator, and have addressed performance issues with many of my sites.

My advice:

  1. Find a different shared host. Since EIG bought HostGator last year, the performance of their shared accounts has fallen off a cliff. MySQL performance is poor, and support wait times are growing.

Previous to 2013 I had high traffic WP blogs that ran with no issues. The new hardware and policies however have taken even my small/simple WP sites down to very low performance levels.

If you stay with HG...

  1. Disable wp-cron: Here's a good help doc: https://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/wordpress/how-to-replace-wordpress-cron-with-a-real-cron-job
  2. Install and use a caching plugin, using mod_rewrite caching (not PHP caching)
  3. A CDN will help the site load faster, and if you host the assets on a different provider, it can help reduce the load on the server.

Honestly, if there's even a remote chance of getting massive traffic, upgrade to a scalable VPS, or a web host that handles traffic surges like WPEngine.

josefresco
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