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

• timdot 15y ago
  Have you considered using a cloud platform such as AWS with a load-balancer? Then, if your site is being hammered, you can simply spawn a new instance. Of course, this is quite a heavy-handed approach. I imagine the best course of action would be to first of all look into tuning Wordpress performance (and that of your database). If you don't need the full power of Wordpress, why not look for something a bit more light-weight (or even code it yourself - it'll be fun!). I have no experience with getting performance from Wordpress so I can't really comment in that area, however I think that should be your first bet (or consider a platform which does the scaling for you - maybe Automattic's offering?)
• apsurd 15y ago
  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 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
• ohgodthecat 15y ago
  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.
• nreece 15y ago
  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-caching-whats-the-best-caching-plugin/ http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web-tutorials/wordpress-c...
• davyjones 15y ago
  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.
• polyfractal 15y ago
  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).
• jelmerdejong 15y ago
  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.