

Ask HN: What is the best managed web hosting solution for high traffic? - YankeesTigers

Help HN!<p>We're a startup in desperate need of a rocksolid managed web hosting solution for an increasingly popular Wordpress website. Our current solution is EC2, but server tasks distract us from focusing on business matters and we simply need to hand off all hosting duties.<p>Thus, we are looking for a 100% managed solution that can not only handle current demands, but future growth with speed and ease, and that's where we've run into a brick wall. Searching the web for hosting providers or reviews is all web spam and offers nothing of value, and we don't know anyone in a comparable situation to get experienced advice from. Every forum thread seems to suggest a DIY dedicated or DIY VPS, which is what we do now and need to move away from.<p>We don't have the revenue to afford something like Wordpress VIP. What else is out there? What else can support this kind of traffic with reliability, speed, and ease?<p>Some details are listed below.<p>- 7 to 9 million visitors per month and growing
- 1500 to 9000 concurrent visitors
- 12 to 18 million pageviews per month
- 3 to 5 TB of outbound data (mostly pictures and video)
- Basic Wordpress with caching plugins<p>Any advice would be tremendously appreciated!
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peripetylabs
I recommend switching from Wordpress to a static website, using something like
Jekyll or Octopress. Then, hosting with S3 and CloudFront is very cheap.

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YankeesTigers
We are way too reliant on Wordpress to move away from it, though we have
considered it. We're already with a dirt cheap Amazon solution, but the low
cost of operation is entirely negated by the time requirements to maintain
everything, which is why we need a managed solution.

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benologist
Have you looked at PaaS providers like Heroku? They'll scale to anything you
grow to and handle a lot of the scaling issues.

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YankeesTigers
We have not, and I'll investigate more later, but from a quick glance it looks
more complex than what we do now. Ideally, we dump the DB somewhere, upload
data, and be done with the server side of things for good.

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benologist
That's pretty much what you do with them, you can automate their capacity
provisioning (to handle requests) with 3rd party tools like HireFireApp
(<http://hirefireapp.com/>) and then the rest of it is you or they making sure
your database and other supporting infrastructure can keep up, most of which
can be handled by them or their partners.

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girasquid
It seems like <http://wpengine.com/> would be perfect for you.

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YankeesTigers
We looked into them months ago, but they don't offer 24/7 support (or even a
support phone number), and have no plan that even comes close to addressing
our traffic needs. Perhaps worse, there are a variety of horror stories in web
master forums of how WPEngine edited customers websites without consent. We
all agreed that no support + editing client code is completely unacceptable.

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girasquid
Their two higher-end plans both seem to offer phone support - wouldn't that be
the support phone number you're talking about? It seems like you'd need to
talk to them about their Premium plan, but it might come in cheaper than
Wordpress VIP while still being managed and specialized for Wordpress.

I'm not a WPEngine customer, so I have nothing to say about others experiences
with them - I've heard good things, but that's all I've got. You've got to do
what makes sense for you - good luck.

EDIT: after doing some more reading, their Enterprise offering seems like
exactly what you want (assuming they don't still make edits to sites):
<http://wpengine.com/enterprise/> \- the price tag is out of your range,
though. :(

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YankeesTigers
I hadn't seen their enterprise option, but if our budget allowed for $5000/mo
we'd be with Wordpress VIP anyway. Maybe someday! :)

