It never ceases to amaze me how much of an impact it can heave have, releasing a
wordpress related
theme or
plugin.
The move to (mt) Media Temple from dreamhost has been the single best hosting move bar none. I cannot emphasise strongly enough just the staggering difference of having a rock solid hosting service means to me.
Although the statistics shot through the roof1 representing an average 75%+ boost in overall activity2, I hardly noticed the ‘bump’. I was able to continue approving comments, update the post and plugins page and generally continue to function without wondering what the hell happened to my hosting service.
When I compare that to the blogdotting event caused by Matt directly linking to a post whilst I was still on dreamhost, the end results are poles apart.
Given that a picture is worth a thousand words, the following two images represent what happens when a plugin is released here at the ‘foo:
The general interest in even the smallest, simplest plugin such as sig2feed, can generate masses of additional traffic — if there is one piece of free advice I can give for any budding plugin developer, it’s “prepare for the demand”.
If you’re using the more budget orientated hosting service3 the likelihood of your hosting server buckling under the strain of serving pages to hundreds of hosts concurrently is extremely high.
Speaking of page views, this is the ‘other’ statistic I was refering to:
I seriously recommend installing wp-cache and activating it upon release if you have any qualms about your hosting provider — there is nothing worse than really wanting to check out a new plugin and have to wait for potentially hours on end, until the particular host’s load lightens enough to get some action happening.
I’ve had conversations with a number of people now, regarding their frustration at less-than-stellar4 hosting experiences and all I can really offer in return is what was once recommended to me.. two letters.. (mt).
- .. a 3 fold increase in metrics across the board no less. (↩)
- .. one particular statistic reported just shy of a 750% increase (↩)
- .. which is going to be a-ok 98% of the time, might I add. (↩)
- .. reliability seems to really have taken a noise dive for a few hosting companies of late (↩)
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of mt, plugins, statistics, wordpress.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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Oct 10th, 2006 at 5:42 am
Well configured wp-cache is a great plug-in. My bandwith dropped upto 68% and serverload is none since I use wp-cache for my WP-sites.
Oct 10th, 2006 at 6:09 am
I heartily agree. It helps act as a buffer for the times when load goes stratospheric. I had a similar (although not quite as dramatic) jump in load after releasing broadleaf and had it in the wings then, just in case.
It’s not in use right now, simply because, well, I don’t appear to need it. :)
Oct 10th, 2006 at 11:09 am
Doesnt WP 2 have some sort of cacheing built in?
Oct 10th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Yes, it does.
However it can be slower than directly accessing pages, does not have any management options and can also be inclined to cause issues.. so much so it was disabled by default