Pages like this is literally what CDNs are great for.
https://github.com/paragonie/airship/blob/e24ea5a4605336b171...
This is something that really ought to be baked-in in 2016.
https://paragonie.com/project/airship
Working on the PKI and plugin distribution system right now, so people can make/share themes and whatnot.
What do you think of compiling PHP plus libs for app compatibility to something like Rust, Ada, or Cyclone where possible? And do you know if anyone has assessed quality/security of Quercus/Resin code in particular? Seems something like that compatible with WordPress or Airship could be quite a boost in defense of code injection at system level. Performance, too, as we saw with HipHop.
In addition to your examples of Quercus and HHVM, someone is currently working on compiling PHP to .NET: http://www.peachpie.io
I'm not aware of any security audits on any of these efforts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanger_%28compiler%29
Already runs WordPress, phpBB, etc. Anyone doing this sort of thing on .NET might consider starting with contributions to it. I'm trying to avoid CLR and JVM due to runtime complexity where possible. Aside from Rust, Go is another possible target for a simple runtime.
Not that hard to scale static blog post wordpresses.. but man the default is like 4 requests per second bad ;)
I have a cheap VPS and didn't do anything fancy with caching. I just don't code like a n00b.
Also, either use SuperCache or ditch WordPress entirely.