

Ask HN: How To Prepare a Site For Hacker News? - nathanpc

Some weeks ago I submitted a link to an article I wrote (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3442640) and I got a lot of views from Hacker News, which made me restart my server several times.<p>It's hosted at Rackspace Cloud Servers.
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nreece
If you have a WordPress blog, you should use a caching plugin like WP Super
Cache, Hyper Cache or W3 Total Cache. It will drastically reduce the server
load and improve the performance significantly.

See caching plugins review: [http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web-
tutorials/wordpress-c...](http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web-
tutorials/wordpress-caching-whats-the-best-caching-plugin/)

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apsurd
Ditch Wordpress.

Did your site make it to the front page?

My website made it to #2 on HN front page yesterday :
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521309>

I logged about 7k visits with ~200 peak concurrent visits. I wouldn't say
that's server-stalling level traffic but the thing is my site is hosted on
GitHub Pages so it's entirely static.

I don't mean to troll, I think there's a Wordpress plugin called supercache or
something (google wordpress caching) .

But I do want to officially advocate that you rethink whether or not you
_really_ need a mysql database, x plugins, and PHP to run a blog

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davyjones
You are better off asking such technical queries at ServerFault.com.

Aside, one quick thing I noticed was that you are using Apache. I would
recommend that you switch to nginx. You are already handling your comments
with Disqus. I would think that generating static pages and handling comments
through Disqus is ideal.

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jelmerdejong
Next to use a good caching plugin like W3 Total Cache, you can try CloudFlare.
This really reduces your server load, speeds up your website and lowers spam
comments on your blog.

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polyfractal
nginx + PHP-fastCGI and caching your WordPress is probably the best route.
Xcache for PHP if you are feeling frisky. Host your static assets from
CloudFront (gzipped CSS/JS/images).

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ohgodthecat
Wordpress is fine so long as you have a decent host. (See not super shared
hosting like godaddy dreamhost etc)

The main thing you need to do is add caching to wordpress (both w3tc and
supercache work fine) and if there is still a problem you are probably on the
wrong host and should upgrade to either something like linode or a mediatemple
grid server or webfaction basic plan.

If you're on a VPS and have caching enabled and still can't manage the traffic
I'd say something is wrong with your configuration but just looking at your
site I see no caching from either of the plugins I listed.

