
WordPress VIP sites have been hit by outages - sidyapa
https://techcrunch.tumblr.com/post/185522867574/wordpress-vip-go-sites-are-experience-outages
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lioeters
Here's a plain version without the Oath consent form:
[https://outline.com/BhZZTZ](https://outline.com/BhZZTZ)

This one might be a better article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20158002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20158002)

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AznHisoka
Can't this outage not be fixed? I'm seeing much faster load times!

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r721
Updates: [https://lobby.vip.wordpress.com/2019/06/11/503-errors-and-
av...](https://lobby.vip.wordpress.com/2019/06/11/503-errors-and-availability-
issues-for-vip-go-sites/)

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aussieguy1234
I used to work on a VIP site, it was their largest customer and we got 600
million monthly pageviews.

Scaling WordPress to that level is a challenge, but with multiple levels of
network and software caching, it worked.

My particular sites wouldn't be down, because of akamai fallback.

~~~
tuananh
i had a site with ~ 10m pageviews monthly that used to run on a $20
DigitalOcean instance.

What kind of things you need to do to scale that up to 600m PV monthly?

~~~
blowski
Depends on whether the majority of views are on static blog posts, as they can
be cached and served from nginx. But if you’ve got a lot of dynamic views -
comments, admin, personalised - it’s much harder.

Still impressive you managed to get that level of performance out of a $20 DO
box.

~~~
toast0
10m page views really doesn't look that big if you bring it down to
pageviews/second and there's some reasonable distribution.

Assuming a busy day is 1M, and that a busy hour of the busy day has 100,000,
but over the hour is evenly distributed, you're looking at under 30 page views
per second. Maybe peak is a little more. If this is tuananh's current site,
it's Jekyl, so it's all static -- you could probably host that on a 486 (as
long as there aren't any big images to clog the nic). If it's something with a
little bit of dynamic content, you might need to be careful about how you
structure it, but something reasonable should be fine at that level of traffic
too, just need to make sure you don't spend a lot of cpu doing useless work
(like some frameworks that take 60ms to output hello world)

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benbristow
Rolling Stone are currently on the default Twenty Seventeen Wordpress theme.

[https://rollingstone.com/](https://rollingstone.com/)

Quite amusing.

~~~
jesseb
Hackaday is borked too.

[https://hackaday.com/](https://hackaday.com/)

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kartan
Diversity in nature or technology is important. And it's worrisome that both
are disappearing.

"The resulting homogeneity and uniformity can offer substantial advantages in
both the quantity and quality of crop harvested, but this same genetic
homogeneity can also reflect greater susceptibility or pathogens. Thus it
appears the more that agricultural selection disturbs the natural balance in
favor of variety uniformity over large areas, the more vulnerable such
varieties are to losses from epidemics."
[https://www.nap.edu/read/2116/chapter/5](https://www.nap.edu/read/2116/chapter/5)

\-
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/01/aws_outage/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/01/aws_outage/)

\- [https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/2/18649635/youtube-
snapchat-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/2/18649635/youtube-snapchat-
down-outage)

\-
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/11/wordpress_vip_go_ou...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/11/wordpress_vip_go_outage/)

And if we take the word of Steve Jobs on this one we are for a hard ride: "It
turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get
monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox,
so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly
market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and
marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product
people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget
what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product
genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by
people running these companies that have no conception of a good product
versus a bad product.

They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good
idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their
hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
[https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-why-
innovation...](https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-why-innovation-
dies-at-tech-monopolies-2014-11?r=US&IR=T)

With our economy and daily lives so dependent in a few companies, any drop in
quality will impact all corners of society.

~~~
username444
I'm not sure why you think hosting diversity is disappearing when it comes to
WordPress. The past 2 years has seen a huge surge in great companies offering
premium managed WordPress hosting services.

Liquidweb, cloudways, wpengine, getflywheel, pantheon.

Granted, many use google cloud or similar for actual hosting rather than their
own metal... But the services built on top have never been better.

~~~
Kluny
Agreed, VIP is good for enterprises, the paid tiers are okay for personal
sites... But as soon as a medium sized business gets into customizations, they
have to move off WordPress and onto one of the many dedicated WordPress
hosting companies.

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jddj
Hackaday's case was interesting, they quickly hacked (sorry) a fix together
and by mistake ended up piping all comments into the RSS feed.

[https://hackaday.com/2019/06/11/the-day-hackadays-theme-
was-...](https://hackaday.com/2019/06/11/the-day-hackadays-theme-was-broken/)

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JMTQp8lwXL
Aren't most of these sites fronted by CDNs that should solve that problem?

~~~
minimaxir
WordPress blogs/themes are not static assets.

~~~
orf
They kind of are though.

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hbcondo714
We have some sites hosted under WordPress.com's Business Plan; luckily it
looks like we are not affected by this.

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itsaidpens
We host our sites on Pantheon - I've loved them. Check them out - pantheon.io

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Ayesh
I know many Pantheon people closely and had seen what they do. It's a good
platform, but WordPress.com platform tend to be a lot more mature and
reliable, despite this incident.

