

Ask HN: My site can't handle meaningful traffic. Help? - DanLivesHere

I'm looking for a company which can manage the hosting of my websites -- someone who can keep them up when one of them hits the front page of reddit. Twice this week, I've gotten there, and twice, I've been effectively offline.<p>The site which keeps crumbling is a Cloudflare enabled (but I've probably screwed that up) Wordpress install running one of the preferred caching extensions. So the problem is either my hosting provider (Lunarpages) and/or my total inexperience here, and probably both with an emphasis on the latter. But there are two or three other projects on the server as well, plus a number of mothballed ones that I'm keeping available.<p>I'm willing to pay for this, of course. I'm paying Lunarpages for a dedicated server (and too much, at that) would gladly move at this point.  And I'm not well versed, to say the least, in these issues, so I do not really think doing it myself is an option.<p>Advice welcome.
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cd34
Remove W3TC and replace it with WP Super Cache. Verify that the .htaccess
rules are installed correctly through their test and ensure that the W3TC
rules are removed completely.

Most caching ignores surfers with cookies (i.e. logged in users) which then
points to the plugins you might be using when logged-in surfers visit your
site. Category with counts, Tag Cloud, the Post Calendar are the three most
expensive queries in wordpress. WP-Statpress is also a huge performance
problem - you can just put indexes on the tables to get reasonable performance
out of it. Some of the related posts plugins are problematic as well.

Profile the site, figure out which plugins contribute to the problems, see if
there are better/acceptable replacements.

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evertonfuller
You're paying at least $109 a month right? That's kinda shocking that it's
down all the time.

How many hits are we talking about? Like 50k? More?

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calbear81
If you have multiple sites, have you considered hosting directly through
Wordpress.com VIP Hosting? The cost is a bit steep starting at $2,500 for up
to 5 wordpress installs but they seem to handle a lot of high traffic sites
well. The other option could be to host some of the resources like images and
static content on Amazon S3. I'm not knowledgeable enough on WP to know
whether it's the server of the way your site is set up.

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twog
Hey Dan, drop me an email I can definitely help you out. I run a hosting
company tailored for high traffic wp sites (im a contributor to WP) for some
extremely high traffic Wordpress blogs. Message me at TwoGiraffes.com

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revorad
Have you looked at <http://wpengine.com> ?

