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Need help to manage high traffic website
I am new in server management. I have a website which is having daily 15k-18k visitors and 60k to 80k page views. Currently its hosted on VPS which is having following configuration
OS/CP - Centos/cPanel with litespeed (2 core)
RAM - 30 GB
CPU - 8 Core
Storage - NVME
Network speed - 600 Mbit/s
Stack - WordPress
Caching plugin - Litespeed
Website Type - static (no user interaction like register, login or comment)
CDN - Free Cloudflare
Visitor - 99% from India
Now the problem is sometimes at the peak hours my website start to show server error and also load slowly.
Recently I have implemented Cloudflare Cache Reserve feature.
So my questions are
1. Should I offload my media files (images) to S3/Google Cloud/Digital Ocean etc?
2. Should I increase server configuration?
3. Should I upgrade litespeed license type?
4. Should I change control panel?
5. Should I change my server to nginx?
6. Should I buy dedicated server?
Please help to improve my site performance?
Comments
Even a VPS with that configuration you already have should be able to handle 80K page views per day, which are not many. Moving media to an object storage and using a CDN would already reduce the requests your server would need to process, so it would help of course. If you are using Apache as web server definitely switch to Nginx + PHP FPM. Not sure how Litespeed cache works, but in the past when I used Wordpress I used a caching plugin like WP_Super cache or Total Cache that caches the full site to static files on disk, and Nginx is extremely fast at serving those. Also I recommend you look into Cloudflare's own caching plugin because it allows you to serve basically all pages directly from CDN, thus reducing the load on your server dramatically https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/integrations/wordpress/
I don't think you need a bigger server let alone a dedicated one for that traffic. I am pretty sure that with some optimizations you could do with even a smaller VPS.
Simply Turn On -> Cloudflare APO!
Thanks I will surely look into it
Do I have to disable litespeed cache then?
Nope. Keep both On!
Is the vps on the same location?
Do not forget that Cloudfaire APO does not work for registered users... But these are the ones that consume the most resources, which do not go through the cache ...
You must have another problem, because the server is largely dimensioned for this traffic ... Then you have to see the number of plugins, etc.
Sometimes, it's just a database setting, or a greedy email service ...
Since it is wordpress, block xmlrpc.php requests and check your logs for strange searches or queries eating CPU. Your set-up is more than enough to deliver that kind of traffic.
try not to use cpanel. Use nginx+php-fpm+mariadb. Use wp plugin w3tc with Cache. Try to use bunnycdn for images,css,js files. Cloudflare work well.
Thank you everyone for your suggestion
No server is not in same location
if you buy VPS from a provider who is overselling too much VPS on one node then CPU load time may be shown high otherwise your VPS configuration is fine to handle this traffic.
Is your wp theme in newest version? I've had the same issue few years back, turns out I just need to update my theme.. and all problems gone
Do you have any interactive components like comments, user registration?
If your website is completely static (only show page content & ads), consider export your WordPress to static html and deploy the whole page on Cloudflare Pages.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/how-to/deploy-a-wordpress-site/
Pros: no more server to maintain. The visitors can load your website from edge CDN almost instantly.
Cons: have to upload static files to Cloudflare Pages every time you changes the content. Any interactive components like comments, form submission have to be a 3rd party solution.
Hello! I would highly recommend having your images or video files on a CDN Storage which would be cheaper sometimes than renting an actual Storage VPS
I highly recommend an S3 compatible storage container.
2nd For a site getting that many views if you are hosting images or videos a network increase maybe something to look into. 3rd I would recommend a much bigger platform for having that many visitors like a cluster of containers hosting it.
1. Should I offload my media files (images) to S3/Google Cloud/Digital Ocean etc?
2. Should I increase server configuration?
3. Should I upgrade litespeed license type?
4. Should I change control panel?
5. Should I change my server to nginx?
6. Should I buy dedicated server?
I am using wpastra
Thanks a ton for your time and answer
Why dont you pre-render all of your pages and then put them onto Cloudflare Pages?
I am using contabo
Thanks for your suggestion I will try to upload all my media to cloudflare r2
That could be the problem if the node you are on is heavy oversold. We would need more specific information, there is a bottleneck somewhere but we don't know where.
Disk I/O? Maybe. CPU? Maybe.
If you use full page caching, as @JasonM said you should be able to run your site well on 2 cores and 2GB of RAM... so given the hardware that you say you use you probably have a configuration problem somewhere. Hack, it should work fine even with a shitty VPS if what you end up serving are static pages.
Are you sure that the cache actually works?
If you need help running a VPS I can help you find a cheap affordable solution with us. We can also help monitor your traffic as we have a 24x7 support team.
Try switching to a dedicated server. It is now easy to find very powerful dedicated servers at a very competitive price (hetzner or even other competitors).
Why add more hardware without even trying to fix what's wrong? It will likely work but hard to consider this as the best solution. Full page caching + nginx or litespeed = he should be able to handle way more traffic on the VPS he describes...
Buy a kimsufi it will work better than a vps and you will have dedicated resources with dedicated server
Try @Shakib or @NDTN. Because they both have high performance cpu and nvme disk at cheap price. Try to find best yabs scores from here. And try to use Singapore datacenter since your traffic is from india.
I would suggest you have a look at this thread, where I am showing that a VPS with 1.5 GB of RAM is able to very successfully serve 10.000 requests per minute for a 3 MB WordPress homepage.
I would say that the issue you are facing is basically related to the cache and the headers because your server should fly with that configuration.
@Iamtechguru It your website providing special content?
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/183054/how-many-visitors-can-handle-a-small-vps#latest
Response Times
Average 27 ms
Min/Max 19 / 287 ms
Response Counts
Success 10000 Timeout 0
400/500 0 / 0 Network 0
Bandwidth
Sent 1.03 MB
Received 2.02 GB
Hope this is helping you!
If you are using WordPress, I can tell you that this plugin works like magic. I tested other ones before, but the speed of this one is really good.
You need to modify the settings to also minimize the HTML, CCS, and JS.
Name: WP Fastest Cache
Run the following script and post back the output file $SYS_STATUS. It collects information on your memory, CPU, network socket, and disk consumption. Perhaps we could find where the bottleneck is then.