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Optimal configuration for news website

Posted on December 14, 2014

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

  1. Should I use Nginx, Apache, or both? And if the later, which configuration?
  2. 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?
  3. 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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Personally, I would use Apache and Nginx as a reverse proxy. I don’t get as much traffic as you do but it has been working great for me. Also I have varnish as my cache system.

Checkout this Article/Tutorial. They talk about optimizing a wordpress heavy content site with varnish.

hope this helps

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