DO hosting plan & strategy for Wordpress Multisite?

December 14, 2013 3.3k views
dips_want
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dips_want
What is the optimum plan to host a Wordpress MS with Thousands of customers ? A customer is provided with a site(subdomain) with the limit of 50MB storage and 1000 visitors. It would be helpful if you can assist me with the following: 1. Server Infrastructure: One big server vs many small server, Separate web server and database server OR Together, File storage solution. 2. How to handle the sudden spike in the traffic 3. Scaling strategy when the customer base grow 4. Do anybody have an idea How wordpress.com & edublogs.org handle millions of customer?
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1 Answer
pablo December 15, 2013
You can achieve millions of hits a day on a 512MB droplet, if you follow WordPress best-practices. Start with How To Install Wordpress, Nginx, PHP, and Varnish on Ubuntu 12.04. You'll also want to add memcache, APC, and a CDN for static files. A caching plugin like W3 Total Cache also does wonders.

Think twice about using Multisite, and consider going with How To Set Up Multiple WordPress Sites on a Single Ubuntu VPS, instead (but substituting Nginx for Apache). There's a newer article, also, but I haven't gotten a chance to go through it: How To Configure Single and Multiple WordPress Site Settings with Nginx.

I tried Multisite for a while and was frustrated that not all plugins support Multisite (including -- at the time, at least -- many of the popular ones). While other popular plugins did (technically) support Multisite, you could quickly tell that they were designed for single-WordPress installs and were merely subsequently stretched to "support" Multisite -- w/o revisiting fundamental framework decisions; in other words, many plugins that "supported" Multisite did not work as well as they did on single-WordPress installs.

Not sure about edublogs.org, but WordPress.com utilizes Nginx loadbalancing.
How To Install Wordpress, Nginx, PHP, and Varnish on Ubuntu 12.04
by Etel Sverdlov
Varnish is an HTTP accelerator and a useful tool for speeding up a server, especially during a times when there is high traffic to a site. It works by redirecting visitors to static pages whenever possible and only drawing on the server itself if there is a need for an active process. This tutorial covers installing wordpress on a LEMP stack (with nginx instead of apache), and then installing varnish.
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