Developer Advice For a WordPress Directory Site

Mozie
(@buyqualityplr)

6 years, 9 months ago
Hello

I started working on a business directory for South Africa, UK, Canada, Australia, India and New Zealand.

While building it on WordPress I did not consider if WordPress could handle a massive amount of posts and traffic.

I did reach out to my host, and they told me, “these are questions for a developer”. So I am hoping someone here is able to give me advice and guide me in the right direction. I do not want to officially launch the site if my current setup will fail or if WordPress cannot handle it.

The site is currently on a good VPS and I am willing to move to a dedicated server if the site grows and needs it.

Here’s the questions I asked my host and their answers.

1. Can WordPress handle a huge amount of custom posts like 500 000?

That’s a question for an experienced WordPress developer.

2. Would a VPS be able to handle it? and if it grow would a dedicated server handle it?

That depends on how efficient the site is, there’s no way for us to speculate on that.

3. If it is possible with WordPress, what would be recommended for best user experience in terms of speed for databases and hosting?

LiteSpeed and LSCache, as I previously recommended.

4. What is my current traffic limits on my VPS?

Do you mean bandwidth? That shouldn’t be an issue, there’s 5TB and here’s the usage so far this month.

—
41.24 GB of 5 TB used / 4.96 TB free
—

5. 70% of the categories have been added included countries, cities and the normal web directory. and it’s 7700 item categories at the moment. so approximately 10k categories would be added in total. Would WP handle this with lots of actual listings on them and high traffic?

Again, that’s probably a question for a developer. But LiteSpeed and LSCache can help cache pages that are hit frequently and as a result it can deliver a large amount of traffic even on less powerful hosting packages.

Also, we’d recommend using PHP 7.3 if the site is compatible, currently it’s the latest PHP version available in EA4 and it’s the most efficient.

I’d really appreciate any help.

Mozie
- This topic was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).
The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)

Moderator James Huff
(@macmanx)

6 years, 9 months ago

1. Can WordPress handle a huge amount of custom posts like 500 000?

Should be no problem there. Some examples, https://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/news/ and https://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/media/

2. Would a VPS be able to handle it? and if it grow would a dedicated server handle it?

I’d recommend starting with a VPS for that, it’s trivial to move to another server when it’s time to grow.

3. If it is possible with WordPress, what would be recommended for best user experience in terms of speed for databases and hosting?

We have some recommended hosting providers at https://wordpress.org/hosting/

And some performance recommendations at https://wordpress.org/support/article/optimization/

4. What is my current traffic limits on my VPS?

That’s a question for the hosting provider you choose, they set those limits.

so approximately 10k categories would be added in total. Would WP handle this with lots of actual listings on them and high traffic?

Yep, no problem there, see those earlier examples. 😉

But LiteSpeed and LSCache can help cache pages that are hit frequently and as a result it can deliver a large amount of traffic even on less powerful hosting packages.

Yep, caching ensures that a static page is served, rather than WP having to generate the page from the database on each view.

Also, we’d recommend using PHP 7.3 if the site is compatible, currently it’s the latest PHP version available in EA4 and it’s the most efficient.

We also recommend PHP 7.3: https://wordpress.org/about/requirements/

catacaustic
(@catacaustic)

6 years, 9 months ago

1. Can WordPress handle a huge amount of custom posts like 500 000?

Yes. I had a site that had close to 1,000,000 custom posttype “pages” before it was retired, and it ran fine. It’s more about hwo things need to interact instead of pure quantity. As an example, shwoing one of 1,000,000 items is quick and easy, but doing a search for the sum or 500 meta data records of somewhat related items could easily be a slow query.

5. 70% of the categories have been added included countries, cities and the normal web directory. and it’s 7700 item categories at the moment. so approximately 10k categories would be added in total. Would WP handle this with lots of actual listings on them and high traffic?

No problem. Again, it’s more to do with how things are displayed instead of just how many there are.

Howdy_McGee
(@howdy_mcgee)

6 years, 9 months ago

I absolutely recommend finding a host that specializes in WordPress installs. I am personally fond of Dreamhost but any of these on the hosting page will do.

Thread Starter Mozie
(@buyqualityplr)

6 years, 9 months ago

Thanks to everyone for your answers. I really appreciate it.

I am currently with KnownHost on their best VPS with litespeed, they have been awesome so far to be honest. But their basic support was not able to answer these questions and I was requested to pay $35/hour to speak to “professional services dept”.

I don’t mind paying for help. But I just wanted to know if what I want to do is possible.

@catacaustic Thanks for that. That is something I’d need to look into. Is there any chance I could give you login so you can tell me how things are displayed?

I’m a total Noob when it comes to checking things like this.

catacaustic
(@catacaustic)

6 years, 9 months ago

No. Do not give me, or anyone else on here, login (or any other sort of security details) for any purpose at all.

As for if it works, a quick look through won’t tell me anything anyway. You realyl just have to rely on your developer knowing what they are doing.

Moderator James Huff
(@macmanx)

6 years, 9 months ago

But their basic support was not able to answer these questions

To be fair to them, that makes sense. They know how their services work and can help with that, but you can’t expect them to know the inner workings of every web software out there.

Is there any chance I could give you login so you can tell me how things are displayed?

That’s definitely against the rules here: https://wordpress.org/support/guidelines/#the-bad-stuff

Also, watch out for https://wordpress.org/support/guidelines/#do-not-offer-to-pay-for-help

If you want to hire someone and/or give them direct access, please try https://jobs.wordpress.net/ and do not accept any hire or direct access offers posted to these forums.

Thread Starter Mozie
(@buyqualityplr)

6 years, 9 months ago

OK understood, sorry about that, was not aware.

Thanks for all the help and answers.

Thanks for the link share.

JNashHawkins
(@jnashhawkins)

6 years, 9 months ago

The best thing to do is plan for expansion… if you never need it then fine but if you need it and can’t afford it and then can’t leverage your own ‘sweat’ into what you need then you’ll need to leverage your ‘eraser’ and downsize.

If the money is there to double your hosting with a second VPS then you can split the database over to a second server. In reality, you would probably leave the database where it is and move the site itself (sans the database) to the new server while utilizing the database over on the old host.

Cloudflare is worth about 10% to as much as 20% of your increasing hosting needs… but only if your host is fast enough to feed Cloudflare without 500 errors.

Business Directories can take up a good bit of horsepower just driving the plugin.

Have you considered a multisite with individual sites for the countries? That might let you concentrate on a single country and perfect your system then expand.

Thread Starter Mozie
(@buyqualityplr)

6 years, 9 months ago

OK so my host told me the site runs on MyISAM.

Do you think I should should move over to InnoDB? Would it be better for searches if the database is very big?

And yes I will get the site on cloudflare with litespeed and additional security measures.

My host just replied about the database query and said this:

MyISAM performs just fine for database read operations, but when it comes to writing or updating data, the entire table is locked until the process is complete. This prevents any other read/write operations from starting in that table until that individual process is done. InnoDB only locks the single row being written to, freeing up the rest of the table for simultaneous operations.

Another big difference is the way both storage engines interact with memory on the server. There is a specific pool of Memory called the InnoDB Buffer Pool to be used by InnoDB tables. Tables which use MyISAM are not able to use this Memory pool, meaning they write to disk (swap) instead of using the database memory. Due to the above reasons Innodb should work faster than MyISAM.

Moderator James Huff
(@macmanx)

6 years, 9 months ago

Your host said it best, InnoDB will be better for sites you expect a lot of interaction on. 🙂

Anuj Singh
(@anuj2323)

6 years, 7 months ago

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