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Question

Optimal configuration for multiple WordPress websites

  • Posted February 28, 2014

Hello everyone! Need some advice from the community.

The story:

I have several websites, all of them powered by WordPress. 2 are large news portals with lots of images (one currently has 18Gbs of images and 82Mb db, the second is much younger and has only 600Mb of pictures and 3Mb db). All other sites are small minimalistic blogs or kind of “static” small websites with WP backend and low traffic. Here’s the “infrastructure” I’m considering:

  • Each large news site on separate droplet
  • All small sites on another droplet

Questions:

  1. What’s better - Apace, Nginx, Apache with Nginx for static files in front of Apache?
  2. Is it a good idea to use memcached on 512/1024Mb droplets?
  3. What’s better - 2 news sites on 2 separate 1024Mb droplets or both on one 2048Mb droplet?
  4. Does it makes sense to have those 2 news websites on separate droplets (or single more powerful - see 3.) and 1 extra droplet just for MySQL?
  5. Or maybe 1 droplet for both news sites under Apache (serving only WP itself), 1 separate droplet with MySQL and 1 more for static files under Nginx?

Thanks in advance!

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Ihor Vorotnov • March 12, 2014

Kamal, thank you for the reply! I’m already convinced to move from Apache to Nginx and use a separate droplet for database. Other questions seem to be less important and it’s pretty easy to make changes later and move sites from one droplet to another.

Kamal Nasser • March 1, 2014

<blockquote>1. What’s better - Apace, Nginx, Apache with Nginx for static files in front of Apache? </blockquote>Nginx. <br><blockquote>2. Is it a good idea to use memcached on 512/1024Mb droplets?</blockquote> I don’t see why not. <br><blockquote>3. What’s better - 2 news sites on 2 separate 1024Mb droplets or both on one 2048Mb droplet? </blockquote>That depends on many factors, but hosting them on one droplet should be fine. <br><blockquote>4. Does it makes sense to have those 2 news websites on separate droplets (or single more powerful - see 3.) and 1 extra droplet just for MySQL? </blockquote>I would move MySQL (you should look into using MariaDB instead, which is a drop-in replacement of MySQL) to its own droplet and use it for all of the sites.