Hacker News Reader

> It's great at what it does but I think you've out grown it.

There is absolutely no justification for him to be running into these sort of issues at such an incredibly low load. Let's pretend he gets 50,000 hits per day (he says 50k per month but I don't know reqs/sec). Than's less than one per second. The $5/mo box over at DigitalOcean can handle 100 times that with the most poorly optimized PHP, Wordpress, and MySQL installation.

The problem is entirely due to a shitty host and/or grossly misconfigured server. No CMS should run into load issues at the microscopic traffic levels he's complaining about. He doesn't need Cloudflare, either.

So, yes, a static site would indeed perform better but to imply that he's actually reaching the limits of a simple CMS is absolutely ridiculous.

I'd pretty confidently bet this guy has some ridiculous and/or buggy wordpress plugin that loads a bunch of images or is horribly written that is causing the problem. Even a naive and basic wordpress install on crappy hardware should be handle this load.

>There is absolutely no justification for him to be running into these sort of issues at such an incredibly low load

Yet he is running into these issues. Is it a buggy plugin or a configuration issue?probably, yes.

But that's exactly the problem static sites solve. I don't mean to say he's out grown it as in you can't serve Wordpress at the volume he's currently getting. I mean you have to have everything setup correctly to do so.One option would be to learn the workings of Wordpress and maybe the web server hosting this. If that's what he wants to do with his time great. I suspect he may have other interests, if that's the case static hosting would be a good alternative. It might not be the best, but it's the best I know.

I developed and maintained the landing page for a top-100 website that was powered by Contentful, ExpressJS and aggressive in-memory caching. The setup was very stable.

I’m guessing your Wordpress install has a bad theme or plugin that is writing errors to the request body and then attempting to send the remaining HTTP headers.

Yeah, you are right. It can be done. But the bulk of the sites I've seen have some cludge that crept in somewhere. Someone installs a broken plugin or writes a custom tweak and things start to fall over. The beauty of static content is this just doesn't happen. You also get some security through simplicity.

I suspect you are very good at what you do. A lot of people are not so good at maintaining an operating site. Especially not a top 100 level.

That said it's a trade off. For every advantage there is a disadvantage. Having to compile to push changes is not without it's headaches. Using external services for comments and other things can run you into all sorts of cors hell.

Can be done doesn't mean it's a good tool for the job. I don't know enough about wordpress to say but I've seen some big sites built off sharepoint and "can be done" involved an extraordinary amount of manpower and working around sharepoint rather than with it. Those details get left out of the case studies.

> Consider moving away from a CMS like Wordpress. It's great at what it does but I think you've out grown it. Static content generators might help here.

This is ridiculous. If he had 100 times the traffic he has, he still wouldn't be anywhere near "outgrowing" Wordpress.

> put cloudfront in front to speed things up.

He already has Cloudfront, and it is completely meaningless snake oil in his situation.

Instead of hosting on S3, aI would recommend google fire add hosting