Is cloud hosting the right direction for my Wordpress site?

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Posted by blakekr, 01-11-2011, 01:54 PM
I have a wordpress site with heavy usage, and would love some advice about how to best host it. Sorry for providing too much info, but I wanted to avoid making people guess about it. Here are some numbers to give an idea: This is bandwidth with most of the image data not included, because they're hosted on Amazon S3. The site gets hardest hit in January, levels off to June-type levels throughout the year, and slows to a crawl in December. Right now I am paying for 2 dedicated servers to host this, which is very expensive, but it's still slow. If you're familiar with wordpress, you know how intensive it is. I use caching (the site would die without it), Zend optimizer, eaccelerator. The site is still slow enough to be penalized by Google in the rankings and that's because of Wordpress' comments table. The site gets many comments every day, which is now five years' worth. I am unable to delete the old ones because they're still being read and used. I would love to outsource my comments to a third party, but this hasn't ever been feasible because the comments contain uploaded images which third party wordpress comment services have remained unable to import. Currently this database table is 22MB. Queries to it are slow to come back, most likely because of the images within the comments and because the comments are threaded, which is much more intensive than "flat" comments. I have honestly spent a few years trying to figure out how to keep these comments from slowing the site down so much, with little success. I'm wondering if cloud computing might be a realistic answer to this problem. If you have experience with wordpress (and its awesome resource-sucking power), and had a site like this, how would you host it and deal with the comments problem? I'm grateful for any responses (but please, don't PM me with commercial adverts for hosts). My goal this year is to get this site running at least "average fast" or hopefully faster, and remove the penalties. Your input greatly appreciated.
Posted by cristibighea, 01-11-2011, 02:02 PM
I doubt cloud hosting will help you in any way, my best guess is you currently have a bottleneck somewhere that needs to be dealt with. Assuming your caching plugin works properly, there shouldn't be any problems, because after the first time a page is requested it should be cached, along with its comments.
Posted by JasonD10, 01-11-2011, 04:53 PM
As stated above, the Cloud won't be the answer to your problem but it will provide you with more control, scalability, and flexibility than you have with traditional Dedicated servers. You can develop, test, implement, and troubleshoot much better on the Cloud than dedicated server, and scale up or down your environment much quicker and in small budget increments. Depending on the provider, you may actually be in for a big upgrade moving to Cloud. Most Cloud's are built on high end hardware that is very fast, and of course it is resilient to failures where your current dedicated servers will cause outages when performing maintenance, or failures. There's a lot of sites that are hosted with Cloud hosting based on similar specs of yours, and some significantly larger. Think of Cloud as a way to better improve your business but the underlying infrastructure is ultimately going to determine the capabilities of your application. Properly designing your application in the Cloud and choosing a good hosting partner to help you with this is going to really help you.
Posted by Uncorrupted-Michael, 01-12-2011, 09:05 AM
Also consider doing things differently - nginx + php-fpm is insanely scalable. We push TBs/mo out of WP without any issues.
Posted by dclardy, 01-12-2011, 12:44 PM
I would suggest trying to find where the performance hit is occurring. Are you using database caching? What web server are you using? If it is apache, use nginx. Use an opcode cacher. Switch to W3 Total Cache. All of these should help.
Posted by blakekr, 01-12-2011, 12:56 PM
Thank you for these replies, I truly appreciate them. Now, do you have any suggestions of where I would find someone who's amazing at this? My sysadmin is already very skilled, but not enough to get my site to where I want it. As for me, my limited unix abilities mostly never left the 90s. Can someone suggest a forum/site/community where I can comb through and find some insanely skilled performance people? I've been looking for several days but I'm not looking in the right places.
Posted by OrbitData, 01-12-2011, 02:02 PM
Do you use Gravatars or have a lot of outbound calls? Also, you need to determine if the issue is bandwidth, database or CPU. You can also look at using a CDN. You ca buy a TB of data for around $100. Cloud hosting is a delivery method. There's nothing special about it from a performance standpoint other than quick scalability. <> Last edited by Mike V; 01-12-2011 at 02:28 PM.
Posted by Uncorrupted-Michael, 01-13-2011, 08:10 AM
Olly has written some great tutorials on nginx + php-fpm here: http://vpsbible.com/ If you don't want to shell out a few bucks you can hit the slicehost articles, or the linode articles. If you go the nginx route stay away from w3-total-cache; it doesn't scale all that well. A properly configured mysql environment, plenty of RAM, and wp-super-cache is all you really need.
Posted by Woody Allen, 01-14-2011, 05:50 AM
Cloud hosting allows you to pay for what you use, since you are not able to predict your visits and you have such visits, it's best to go for something stable. Cloud should be great for you. But of cz, it comes with a cost. try nego with your provider, they might give u a better price for this big package.
Posted by vannarith, 01-22-2011, 12:17 AM
i see that cloud hosting is the final resolution if your site are heavy usage and the host will upgrade automatically regard to your requirement
Posted by cloudtweaks, 01-22-2011, 07:08 AM
Well, agree, you must ask for a free trial before you pay
Posted by Danielx64, 01-27-2011, 03:51 AM
Something else, there a plugin that does caching for your database: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/db-cache-reloaded/ I've tried it on a test site and on a page where I had 15 aql statement running after installing this it bring it down to 10. I can't say if it will help much, but it something to look into