Question
Optimal configuration for news website
I have an average load news website, on which I get a few thousand hits per day, sometimes at once when specific writers publish. Currently I have a LAMP on a 1GB RAM droplet serving a Wordpress website, which obviously is not enough to handle a lot of requests, and even though I’m using caching but I still get database failures in the peak times
I need to make some decisions which I need experts help with
- Should I use Nginx, Apache, or both? And if the later, which configuration?
- Which is better, having my LAMP/LNMP stack on a 2GB droplet or separate MySQL on one 1GB droplet and the others on another 1GB?
- Currently I’m caching using W3 Total Cache Wordpress plugin. Should I keep it or replace/add to it a memcached? And if the later, should it be on a different droplet?
I noticed a similar question here, but it’s not exactly my situation
Thanks in advance
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There have been quite a few discussions on using a separate server for MySQL. I have been following some of the discussions with interest; only one person so far has asked questions and then reported back after doing it. He noted excellent results. Here is that post:
Should I put my MySQL database on a separate server?
just as a side note:
On one droplet I have that runs a few WordPress sites, MySQL was crashing often until I hardened my WordPress login pages and added some extra security on all Wordpress installs. I think some brute-force attacks were crashing the database(but not crashing Apache).
Good insight. I didn’t think about bruteforcing login/reg as a cause. I have already added captcha and TFA. Any other thoughts?
There is a way to switch your login page from wp-login.php to something different. Just google to find how to do that. I should probably write a short tutorial for it.
The gist is that you change your wp-login.php to something custom, like alt-login.php, and then block access to wp-login.php with your .htaccess file.
You could just delete wp-login.php, but it will be re-added on Wordpress updates, so blocking with .htaccess works better for long-term.
Doing that will reduce brute force attacks to almost 0. At least for now!