I’ve moved this blog from blogging platform to blogging platform over the years. Each time my primary motivation for moving was to learn a new technology. Last year I moved from Community Server, hosted on my own Windows Server box in my home to WordPress running on a Linux VM hosted on Amazon AWS. I made this change to force myself to learn PHP and to get more experience using Linux.
I love learning by doing, and it turns out that the move to WordPress on Linux forced me to “do” a hell of a lot. Beyond the simple stuff like dealing with managing instances on AWS and SSH tunneling, I quickly discovered how to setup and manage caching and CDN: When I left Microsoft last summer my announcement hit Techmeme and my blog was overwhelmed. I had to scramble to figure out how to enable caching and CDN in the course of about an hour!
And that setup worked pretty well through the fall, but fairly regularly WordPress would go down with a “Cannot connect to database” error. This would happen seemingly randomly, but also whenever I posted and the blog got moderately high traffic. I knew I needed to do something about it…
Over Christmas break I wrote my “superior” post which hit the top of Techmeme all day. I was on vacation with my family when I wrote that post and missed out an entire afternoon playing on the beach because I was fighting to keep cek.log alive with all the traffic.
Enough. I had learned all I was going to learn from the experiment of hosting the blog myself.
Someone suggested I look at www.wpengine.com.
I did and about 4 hours later the people at WP Engine had moved my blog from my AWS instance to their hosting service (they took care of ALL the dirty work). We had a few hiccups, but it was clear everything was faster and it has been reliable over the past few weeks.
Yesterday I posted another post that was certain to drive a lot of traffic. Sure enough my “fragmentation” post got picked up on Techmeme and my blog got hammered. WP-Engine handled it with aplomb.
There are certainly cheaper ways to host WordPress and there are blogging platforms can scale better than WordPress. I like WordPress’s features and community of add-ins. WordPress.com hosting is too restrictive for me.
Three cheers for WP Engine. I’m a fan.
RSS - Posts
Thanks for the kind words! And welcome.
Great post and update – glad WPEngine is working out!
The nike free run 2 is the latest released Free Shoes. nike free 2011 uses the Free 360 cushioning on the heel and the fuse on the upper leather. These designs make Free 2011 more lightweight and you will feel more comfortable. The cheap nike free run: Barefoot-inspired fit, excellent support, taking a cue from the intricate workings of the bare foot, the nike free run womens Sale’ Running Shoe is designed to maximize the foot’s natural range of motion while providing protection and cushioning.