I am wondering what WordPress users with high-traffic sites do for hosting. Is it possible to predict how many visitors per hour I can handle with a basic WordPress installation, WP Super Cache, and a dedicated server?
Our day-to-day traffic is very manageable (5-10k visitors tops) but there is a high likelihood that we will get some very big spikes in the next couple of months. I don't mean Digg-level... I mean network TV spikes, which means millions of viewers who all click at the same time.
Can my measly $200 a month hosting plan ever hope to keep up with all of this traffic?
I'd talk to your host and see what they give you for $200 a month already: what kind of bandwidth they have for heavy traffic, if they can give you another server to load balance with short notice. And there are performance benchmarks at Super Cache.
Yeah, we can turn on load balancing if we need to, but it takes a week or two to set it up, so we need to jump on that sooner rather than later.
I wonder what people think about MediaTemple - it seems like they have a pretty good infrastructure. I'm just trying to figure out what kind of plan we would need to spec out to be sure we're covered.
A good host should be able to jump on load balancing within a hour or two. I use Hurricane Electric - he.net - for a bunch of sites. They've got real good conectivity and when a linux server goes down (maybe once a year) they have responded in 15 minutes or less via email, right away with a phone call. You can bump to a higher grade server at a monents notice.
