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Back in 2012 or 2013 I built an auto-scaling WordPress hosting off of Azure. It worked OK, better than shared hosting, but the $15 base VM at Azure (it was a ch

Back in 2012 or 2013 I built an auto-scaling WordPress hosting off of Azure. It worked OK, better than shared hosting, but the $15 base VM at Azure (it was a cheaper time back then) couldn't compete with the base $10 droplet at Digital Ocean (it was a more expensive time back then). On top of that Digital Ocean's API was so much better than Azure. So I spent a week and switched to Digital Ocean. Needed to scale the instances less, cost less, so more profit! Unfortunately after 2 months of development, and half a year of marketing it, we only managed to attract a handful of customers, and had to shut it down.

twobat 7y ago
Why did try to scale when you had no customers?
- dx034 7y ago
  If you want to offer a completely automated process, auto-scaling is important. Otherwise it'll fail as soon as the first customers come in.
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  I guess I wasn't perfectly clear. The technology was to scale the customer's wordpress installation when certain metrics were met CPU or RAM > 75%, clone droplet and load balance. The technology was basically an a beefy server for NFS, a beefy MySql server, and a beefy load balancer. When you started hosting with us, you paid $50+/mo and got what felt like a standard WordPress install on a dedicated digital ocean droplet, when metrics showed that you were hitting the scale threshold, we would create a new droplet run an initialization script to mount NFS, set up the nginx server, and then attach it to the loadbalancer. When the combined CPU or RAM droped below the initial scale threshold, it would drop one VM from the load balancer at a time keeping it provisioned for an hour in case it needed to scale again. Worked amazingly well. Sure the load balancer was a single point of failure, but in the 10 or so months that it was running, we never had a second of outage based on pinging the websites.
  - apple4ever 7y ago
    Now that is very cool! I've always wanted to try something like that. What was it written in?
    - jermaustin1 7y ago
      The main application I left hosted at Azure. It was an ASP.Net MVC app. I used the Digital Ocean API to provision infrastructure, and SSH to remotely login and run the initialization bash script. The init script configured nginx, NFS (maybe it was SMB, i dont rmember now), a cron job to minutely heartbeat statistics back to the MVC app. There are so many better ways to do it now, though. Off the shelf load balancers with letsencrypt and an api, hosted dns, managed & clustered databases, monitoring api. It would be a lot simpler today than it was just 2 years ago, let alone 7.
    - neurostimulant 7y ago
      These days you can do it (relatively) easily by using wordpress docker image on kubernetes (or any other container platform). e.g. using Traefik for load balancer, a mysql container or an external mysql db instance (aws, google and do now offer managed mysql), and storage provider that can be mounted from multiple nodes (nfs, glusterfs, ceph, etc) and you're done! You can throw in an sftp container that mounts /var/www so you can manage the wordpress installation using an sftp client.

twobat 7y ago

Why did try to scale when you had no customers?

dx034 7y ago
If you want to offer a completely automated process, auto-scaling is important. Otherwise it'll fail as soon as the first customers come in.
jermaustin1 7y ago
I guess I wasn't perfectly clear. The technology was to scale the customer's wordpress installation when certain metrics were met CPU or RAM > 75%, clone droplet and load balance. The technology was basically an a beefy server for NFS, a beefy MySql server, and a beefy load balancer. When you started hosting with us, you paid $50+/mo and got what felt like a standard WordPress install on a dedicated digital ocean droplet, when metrics showed that you were hitting the scale threshold, we would create a new droplet run an initialization script to mount NFS, set up the nginx server, and then attach it to the loadbalancer. When the combined CPU or RAM droped below the initial scale threshold, it would drop one VM from the load balancer at a time keeping it provisioned for an hour in case it needed to scale again. Worked amazingly well. Sure the load balancer was a single point of failure, but in the 10 or so months that it was running, we never had a second of outage based on pinging the websites.
- apple4ever 7y ago
  Now that is very cool! I've always wanted to try something like that. What was it written in?
  - jermaustin1 7y ago
    The main application I left hosted at Azure. It was an ASP.Net MVC app. I used the Digital Ocean API to provision infrastructure, and SSH to remotely login and run the initialization bash script. The init script configured nginx, NFS (maybe it was SMB, i dont rmember now), a cron job to minutely heartbeat statistics back to the MVC app. There are so many better ways to do it now, though. Off the shelf load balancers with letsencrypt and an api, hosted dns, managed & clustered databases, monitoring api. It would be a lot simpler today than it was just 2 years ago, let alone 7.
  - neurostimulant 7y ago
    These days you can do it (relatively) easily by using wordpress docker image on kubernetes (or any other container platform). e.g. using Traefik for load balancer, a mysql container or an external mysql db instance (aws, google and do now offer managed mysql), and storage provider that can be mounted from multiple nodes (nfs, glusterfs, ceph, etc) and you're done! You can throw in an sftp container that mounts /var/www so you can manage the wordpress installation using an sftp client.