High Traffic site: what is the rigth server ?

January 5, 2015 10.2k views
albcar
By:
albcar

Hello
I have a high traffic website.... from 200,000 daily page views, to 2,000,000 page views per day.... Yes, it is a viral website… I know, they dont have too much time left, but, anyways… I use CDN, and get a huge bill, I also pay almost $1000 for a couple of servers, but, I have the feeling that Im been ripped off by the hosting company…it is a wordpress site, with an average of 3 images per article, of around 125k each image, plus one or 2 embeded youtube videos…
What would be the right dedicated server to host my website?

2 comments
  • Lajamerr January 5, 2015

    Just clarifying, Digital Ocean sells access to Virtual Private Servers not Dedicated Servers. There is an important distinction between the two.

    No one can determine what is the right server for you and your website except for you.

    As Digital Ocean bills hourly I would recommend setting up a droplet on the lowest tier and configure it the way you want and then shut it down and snapshot it.

    Then create a droplet with the snapshot with each tier and start stress testing all of them for roughly 50 minutes. Estimate how many people are going to be using the website simultaneously on average and during peak usage. Then stress test the droplets against those numbers.

    Anyways I would recommend CloudFlare Business($200/month) as the CDN.

    Here is some additional information you should read to help you, http://jplhomer.org/2014/11/put-load-right/

  • byte232 April 12, 2015

    I’m using KeyCDN for content delivery and I’m very happy with it. They offer great value for the money (significantly lower than other CDNs). Starting your own cluster with dedicated servers is again time and effort to develop and maintain (geo routing, load balancing, failover, …). You’re better off with a service like KeyCDN. Having a few servers in one location if not ideal for users around the world.

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5 Answers
DianaM January 6, 2015

I read @Lajamerr comment. As a reply to your question but as for @Lajamerr answer, I would say this:

Install Ubuntu 14.04, put the $40/mo Droplet or to be sure, put the $80.
After that I recommend installing EasyEngine from rtcamp.com, tweak nginx, put PageSpeed, put HHVM with php5-fpm as a fallback and put MaxCDN as a CDN. Also I would recommend to put the Wordpress in nginx-fastcgi_cache mode, and W3TC plugin just for Database and memcache.

It will be enough if not, you can easly upgrade the droplet to another plan.

With 200,000 daily page views, to 2,000,000 page views per day, I used the $40/mo plan, with the configurations I told you, and it was enough.

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  • DianaM January 6, 2015

    P.S. If you really want to do some heavy-dutty-baddass-server, I would recommend configuring serveral droplets and do a Load Balancing and I would say you won’t have a problem.
    If you need help with something let me know, I would gladly help you !

    Thanks,
    Diana

albcar January 20, 2015
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LinuxMovement1 February 26, 2015
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checkresults93 September 13, 2017

I have a site on digital ocean $5 droplet and i have installed site using easy engine command –wpfc but my question is when the traffic reached upto 1k realtime the server response time is too low. So, is there is any command or line to maintain the CPU usage via ssh. Thanks in advance and your suggestion will be appreciated.

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zshanjavaid March 23, 2018

Hi @DianaM - can you suggest any server to me i’m going to hit 30K traffic at the time of my clothing article launch.

here is analytic stats last year may 2017. https://snag.gy/xB2ogF.jpg (expecting more traffic on 26th of Mar 2018

Please suggest droplet size and if there are necessary settings required.

Thanks,
Z

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