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Comment by dmor | Hacker News Reader

I'm really sorry about the site, it went down so hard that I can't even get a cached version for Cloudflare to serve. Time to upgrade some things... personal blog is so neglected.

Update: Google cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d...

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I highly recommend Jekyll and other static generated blog engines as they can handle high traffic and don't suffer from security problems. Hit me with an email if you need any advice, happy to help out.

Thank you. I'll drop you a note, I think it is time. I've been on the same Dreamhost box for 8 years!

Another great solution that doesn't involved changing anything in how you run your blog (or even moving off of Dreamhost), is a front-end cache like http://www.fastly.com/.

It's really affordable for personal sites, and for static sites like yours you'll be getting 98%+ cache hits – almost no traffic will ever hit your Dreamhost box, it will all come from their highly optimized Varnish caches around the world.

Learndot's blog is hosted on a ec2 small instance fronted by fastly, our launch article was on HN/Techcrunch/etc... simultenously and we never went over 10% cpu.

tl;dr: Use fastly.

$50 a month is expensive for a personal blog...

Wouldn't CloudFlare's free plan be just as good here?

Edit: Looks like Danielle thinks so... she signed up with them a few hours ago. https://twitter.com/DanielleMorrill/status/28918229241967411...

Yes, actually I have been a CloudFlare user for awhile but had paused it on my blog while dealing with a vulnerability. By the time traffic spiked and I turned it back on there was no way to reach the site to cache a copy. I also use the paid version for the Referly site and blog, and love it.

I have had the same (well, better) results using Varnish. It's free, too.

TL;DR: Use Varnish.

You also just install WP Super Cache and that'll largely handle your problems.

Dreamhost has one-click Cloudflare integration from the control panel, it will route your DNS for you. I would also use recommend a WP cache plugin to serve mostly static cached files. (edit - looks like you already knew this)

Use Varnish. Or use a service which does that http://substancehq.com/ I am the founder of substancehq btw :)

*Minor edit

WPEngine.com all the way. Bulletproof IMHO.

If we can help you out with your hosting one way or another, Danielle, please just let me know :-)

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