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I have a web site which will be featured in a place which will send a large peak of one-time traffic in a couple of weeks.

The server hosting the website also hosts the control panel my customers use.

The website part is simple and mostly static. But it includes a wordpress blog.

My question How and where can I put or cache the website and blog so that it will make it through traffic peak? For example, is it possible to host the pages on Amazon s3 so that they will be accessible via the regular urls on my domains without going through the server ?

EDIT:

I can change the urls of the control panel so that it will have its own subdomain and will remain on the main server. And force www.mysite.com for access to the company website and blog. Now, how can I make www.mysite.com/page1 read from amazon s3 bucket containing page1 html?

Niro
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  • Can you/have you segregated the control panel, such that you can use entirely different hosts for the high-traffic site and the must-not-be-interrupted site? If you set up, say, "www.example.com" and "cpanel.example.com", it would be very easy to point the www site to a new host or CDN configured to handle a big traffic spike, and leave the cpanel site exactly as it is now. I would also think about redirecting from the high-traffic www site to the cpanel site, instead of the other way around. – gbroiles Aug 26 '10 at 20:36
  • I can change the urls of the control panel so that it will have its own subdomain and will remain on the main servers. And force www.mysite.com for the website. Now, how can I make www.mysite.com/page1 read from amazon s3 bucket containing page html? – Niro Aug 30 '10 at 15:18

2 Answers2

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I'd wonder how much traffic you anticipate, what does your current server look like? How much bandwidth is available to it? What type of disks does it have? How much memory is available to it?

For your S3 solution, you'd need craft redirects to the S3 location, for example:

http://www.yourblog.com/InterestingPage1.html --> http://whatever-s3-url.com/you-get-for-page-1 http://www.yourblog.com/InterestingPage2.html --> http://whatever-s3-url.com/you-get-for-page-2

Nate
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  • Thanks, Its going to be on the front page of top 400 website. probably 10,000's or 100,000's visitors/hour during the peak. The server is standard mediatemple VPS. need caching to handle it for sure, the question is how to do it right and keep the urls for SEO – Niro Aug 26 '10 at 18:09
  • How can I do this redirection without getting all the traffic to the source server. – Niro Aug 26 '10 at 18:10
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    You'll still get hit before you can redirect. It could be useful to put your images and javascript on a CDN and modify your site to use the CDN's URLs. Visitors will still hit your static html, but your server will be free from slowly serving media. – Martijn Heemels Aug 26 '10 at 18:23
  • I guess I was thinking you'd modify the InterestingPage1.html to simply contain a meta refresh to the CDN URL -- this way your server only sends down a 3kb file. It does not remove all load from your server, just most of it. Also, the javascript and image suggestion by @Martijn Heemels may give you the best bang for your buck. – Nate Aug 26 '10 at 18:49
  • Some of the static files are already on CDN (S3) and I will certainly put every possible thing there. I'm conecrned about the static html and wordpress. – Niro Aug 26 '10 at 19:17
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Tell us more about your server, please. What resources are available to you, such as CPU, memory, disks, bandwidth, OS, which webserver software, etc.?

A site that exists of only static files can usually handle a large amount of visitors on any decent server. Wordpress is another matter since it requires more resources to handle a request, but you should look at the WP Super Cache plugin, which generates static pages from dynamic content. It will make a large difference when your site is getting hammered.

I would not get into S3 or other CDN (Content Delivery Network) unless you're both an experienced developer and an experienced sysadmin (or you can hire someone who is). You'll need to figure out your real bottlenecks before diving into solutions that sound cool.

Start with some benchmarks to see how well your server performs. It's not exactly real life, but will give you a feel for its limits. ab (Apache Benchmark) is a good place to start.

Martijn Heemels
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  • Hi, Thanks for the questions. The server is meditemple VPS at its minimum config. Disk 20GB Dedicated RAM 512MB Network Transfer 1TB . But I would like to avoid it getting the traffic because it is in charge on some important tasks (such as the users control panel). I guess I'm looking for a way to transfer the urls from www.mysite.com/page to a s3 URL. How can I do it (with DNS settings?) in a way which will leave the server away from the traffic ? I dont mind caching the wordpress pages also and make them static on S3 for a day or two. I work with AWS so S3 is not new to me – Niro Aug 26 '10 at 18:36
  • +1 for the WP Super Cache plugin. That should help a lot. – steve.lippert Aug 26 '10 at 18:45