10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server • Hacker News Board

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#61

Post by kevinpet » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 4:50 PM UTC

kaiuhl wrote: post #46

The hallmark of Wordpress is ease of use. That's why you can spin up a blog right on their site, and they have a backend designed by Happy Cog. Wordpress is blog software for the technically illiterate. And then I take a look at this blog post that lists all the incantations necessary to scale Wordpress to reasonable scale and I wonder why anyone should do this. If you're setting up your own server, installing nginx,…

Are your engineers going to be writing the content? We run a WordPress instance just as a CMS that then gets pulled into memcache to be served up within our site. It's clunky, but there's no reason to reinvent an editing interface.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#62

Post by MatthewPhillips » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 4:57 PM UTC

showerst wrote: post #57

kaiuhl wrote: post #46

The hallmark of Wordpress is ease of use. That's why you can spin up a blog right on their site, and they have a backend designed by Happy Cog. Wordpress is blog software for the technically illiterate. And then I take a look at this blog post that lists all the incantations necessary to scale Wordpress to reasonable scale and I wonder why anyone should do this. If you're setting up your own server, installing nginx,…

The thing is this - configuring a server is one set of problems, building a decent CMS database/backend is another set of problems, and building a decent browser-based UX for content authoring is a third set. Very few people have all three of these skills, and it's fair to say that 2 and 3 are not yet solved problems. Rolling your own CMS for any non-trivial purpose is always something that sounds like a good idea un…

I would argue that the latter 2 things are not truly needed, and can be iterated on over time. You don't need a CMS, you already have one built into your server: the file system. You don't need a browser-based UX, it's a nice to have. If surviving Reddit's front page is your goal, it's pretty easily doable.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#63

Post by MatthewPhillips » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 5:06 PM UTC

Brajeshwar wrote: post #10

This is good but let's look at from slightly different perspective. The author (Ewan) is so good, so I'll assume his hourly cost runs anywhere between $50 to $80 an hour on sys op. Taking the least denominator - $50, if he spends just 5 hours a month trying to keep his server alive, active, update and making sure it's not down, responding to it if anything happens - that will cost him $200 + $15 per month to maintain…

If a blog is generating that much traffic it's probably generating a good deal of revenue as well. $200 doesn't seem like much if it is getting him consulting gigs.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#64

Post by showerst » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #62

showerst wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is this - configuring a server is one set of problems, building a decent CMS database/backend is another set of problems, and building a decent browser-based UX for content authoring is a third set. Very few people have all three of these skills, and it's fair to say that 2 and 3 are not yet solved problems. Rolling your own CMS for any non-trivial purpose is always something that sounds like a good idea un…

I would argue that the latter 2 things are not truly needed, and can be iterated on over time. You don't need a CMS, you already have one built into your server: the file system. You don't need a browser-based UX, it's a nice to have. If surviving Reddit's front page is your goal, it's pretty easily doable.

_You_ might not need a CMS, but I guarantee that the vast majority of content sites that pull in 10MM visitors+/day have a cms.

You make a good point that if you're just a simple blogger firing off posts in a defined layout, you may as well just hand code html and send static files. I took the point of his post to be more for people who know they have to offer a CMS, and want some basic scaling settings.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#65

Post by philip1209 » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 5:36 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #9

A blog is the most simple to scale application, just one step after the static content. The fact that wordpress has traditionally been not very scalable always used to puzzle me...

Is there some good Python-based blogging system that would be more scalable?

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#66

Post by mortenjorck » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 5:39 PM UTC

showerst wrote: post #57

kaiuhl wrote: post #46

The hallmark of Wordpress is ease of use. That's why you can spin up a blog right on their site, and they have a backend designed by Happy Cog. Wordpress is blog software for the technically illiterate. And then I take a look at this blog post that lists all the incantations necessary to scale Wordpress to reasonable scale and I wonder why anyone should do this. If you're setting up your own server, installing nginx,…

The thing is this - configuring a server is one set of problems, building a decent CMS database/backend is another set of problems, and building a decent browser-based UX for content authoring is a third set. Very few people have all three of these skills, and it's fair to say that 2 and 3 are not yet solved problems. Rolling your own CMS for any non-trivial purpose is always something that sounds like a good idea un…

> if it's powerful enough to flex to non-trivial needs (Modern WP, Drupal, Django, CQ, etc), then it's probably going to feel like a bloated/complex mess to a programmer, because of all the nuances in the problem space.

This is a good rule of thumb, but I have found one shining exception, and it is called ProcessWire. If you've never tried it, I highly recommend a look. It's a CMS that essentially offers you a blank slate and a set of simple, powerful tools that let you mold it into something else quite quickly.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#67

Post by arn » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 6:17 PM UTC

IanDrake wrote: post #54

Great article. Question: If you have Varnish running as a cache, should you really have the WP 3W Cache plugin running too? Seems redundant, but I'm not familiar this tech.

Agreed. I'd like to see the same benchmark run with Varnish + Apache. No W3Cache, No Nginx. I'd bet this synthentic benchmark would show the same performance, meaning it's all just hitting Varnish anyway.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#68

Post by Fluxx » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 6:20 PM UTC

I think this article title is misleading. It's not 10 million hits a day on Wordpress, it's 10 million hits a day using Varnish to a single URL. Might as well say you can serve 10 million hits a day to a static file served out of memory.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#69

Post by jiggy2011 » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 6:20 PM UTC

showerst wrote: post #57

kaiuhl wrote: post #46

The hallmark of Wordpress is ease of use. That's why you can spin up a blog right on their site, and they have a backend designed by Happy Cog. Wordpress is blog software for the technically illiterate. And then I take a look at this blog post that lists all the incantations necessary to scale Wordpress to reasonable scale and I wonder why anyone should do this. If you're setting up your own server, installing nginx,…

The thing is this - configuring a server is one set of problems, building a decent CMS database/backend is another set of problems, and building a decent browser-based UX for content authoring is a third set. Very few people have all three of these skills, and it's fair to say that 2 and 3 are not yet solved problems. Rolling your own CMS for any non-trivial purpose is always something that sounds like a good idea un…

I think CMS engines like wordpress are great for semi technical people who are curious enough to set stuff up themselves.

However whenever I've had a website to develop I've never seen the point of using one.

If the website is going to be very simple the chances are it doesn't really need a full on CMS. All it needs is an HTML/CSS layout and some content that can come from either static HTML files, a few form handlers and perhaps some parts that my client can update themselves. Most of the time this can be solved by simply creating a part of the site behind a login with a few text boxes that update a database and are then displayed on the site or the ability to create lists of things.

I can create this sort of functionality myself from scratch in an afternoon or so and it is usually much easier to use for the client because it will have less buttons on the interface and be designed around metaphors that they are actually interested in (for example types of cake or whatever). I gave a client Drupal to use once and the result was that they would just call me up every time they wanted an update done to the site.

If it's something non trivial then I'd rather not have to work around a clunky PHP codebase and worry about the plethora of security updates I would have to do when I could just create something much more flexible in Java/Scala/Python.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#70

Post by jiggy2011 » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 6:24 PM UTC

padobson wrote: post #55

gumbah wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I wonder why anyone should do this" - Because you're setting this up for a "technically illiterate" client?

+1 - Nothing like being able to show a client who's got a billion dollar idea that his site can handle 10M users for $15/mo. Just remember to explain all the caveats that are being discussed here. We're nothing without out integrity. Your client won't be listening to that point though, he'll only be excited he's going to be a billionaire for $15/mo.

Well if they are going to be getting that amount of traffic either they have a very poor conversion rate/profit margin or they could just afford a proper dedicated server or two.