Comment on Looking for guidance on modernizing a high-traffic WordPress news site
dan@upvote.au 3 days ago
Use a page caching plugin that writes HTML files to disk. I don’t do a lot with WordPress any more, but my preferred one was WP Super Cache. Then, you need to configure Nginx to serve pages directly from disk if they exist. By doing this, page loads don’t need to hit PHP and you effectively get the same performance as if it were a static site.
See how you go with just that, with no other changes. You shouldn’t need FastCGI caching. If you can get most page loads hitting static HTML files, you likely won’t need any other optimizations.
One issue you’ll hit is if there’s any highly dynamic content on the page. You’ll need to use JavaScript to load any dynamic bits.
This is good advise, listen to dan. WP Super Cache is amazing although getting it working just right can take some tweaking.
The Redis Object Cache plugin is worth a try. It’ll only take a minute to set up.
Is it 200k users or 200k page loads? Those are really different as each user will load multiple pages in a month.
It’s 200-250k monthly users… Yeah, the server is overkill. Unfortunately, the situation is a bit more tricky, I forgot to mention the storage constraint in my initial post. Look at the reply I wrote to @dan@upvote.au to see what I mean.
Oh right, yeah, Wordpress does tend to use up an awful lot of storage - every image gets copied 5 or 6 times, in different sizes just incase you need that size. It’s nuts.
You don’t need to store those images in your server though, they can be uploaded to S3 (object storage) where it is 10x cheaper to store them and then you can have a cheaper VPS.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-s3-and-cloudfront/
There are many providers of S3-compatible storage, you don’t need to use AWS. Cloudflare R2 is super cheap - https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/developer-platform/products/r2/ or Hetzner - https://www.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/
they can be uploaded to S3 (object storage) where it is 10x cheaper to store them
This is heavily dependent on the VPS. Some of my VPSes are cheaper than object storage would be.
Yeah, it’s definitely a solution I am currently researching. The main hurdle is to consider how to transfer everything. Let’s say I get a VPS or a cheap, but modern dedicated server with low storage. Or perhaps even wordpress managed hosting if offloading can be properly integrated, since plugin choice and functionality might be limited. Premium plugins like WP Offload Media only work when you already have the media on your local storage. A risky solution would be offloading the media on my current server, then installing the plugin on the new server and hoping all the media syncs…
goldensw@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Sorry for the late reply. We are using an older Hetzner with i7 6700, 64 gb and 500 GB SATA SSD. It’s quite ancient by modern standards and it is starting to show its age in some usecases. I am well aware the new machine is way too powerful for our current context but unfortunately the site is very old so it amassed a huge library of media of over 300gb over many years. If we plan to store it locally, we could probably compress it aggresively to free a few dozen GB, but to be fair it would only delay the inevitable upgrade. Clearly, an alternative would be some sort of media offloading with premium WordPress plugins to ensure robustness and regular updates, but that introduces complexity, so it’s something I will need to discuss with our developer.
But let’s say we do choose this very powerful server, you mentioned loading from the disk, but wouldn’t loading from RAM (given the excessive amount of RAM for this usecase) be preferable whenever available?
dan@upvote.au 5 hours ago
Since you’re using Hetzner, one option is to get a Hetzner storage box to store the media. 1TB space is $4/month (not sure about EU pricing).
On-disk cache prevents a “thundering herd” problem when you reboot - an in-memory cache would be empty on rebootz whereas an on-disk cache survives a reboot. Linux handles caching files in RAM automatically.