WordPress and High Traffic

Ben Brooks defends WordPress:

I have been linked to from Gruber and other high traffic sites before and never once has this site crumbled under the pressure — even when I was on the cheaper Grid-Service from Media Temple. The fact is that if you properly cache and administer your site, well, you can handle a ton of traffic.

True, but no one is arguing otherwise. The problem is that I think that’s a big “if”.

It’s worth noting up front that WordPress.com hosted sites perform admirably under high traffic. The problem is with self-hosted WordPress installations that are not cached — which is the default. People choose WordPress for their self-hosted weblog software because it’s easy to install, and easy to configure with “just put it into a folder” installation of additional themes and plugins. But such an installation can’t handle large amounts of traffic. If I link to an uncached WordPress site, it will go down.

I’ve never used WordPress, so obviously I’m no expert on administering it, but if a smart guy like Dr. Drang has enough trouble getting it to run smoothly with caching that he goes back to running it uncached, I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not easy.

★ Monday, 12 September 2011