I had meeting with a local newspaper company’s owner. they are planning to have a newly designed website. their current website is static and doesnt have any kinds of database. But their weekly pageview figure is around 317k. This figure surely will increase in the future
The question is if i create a WordPress system for them will the website run smoothly with new functionalities (news,galleries may be). it is not neccessary to use lots of plugins. can their current server support wordpress package without any upgrade.
Or shall i think to use php to design website.
Yes – so long as the machinery for it is adequate, and you configure it properly.
If the company uses CDN (like akamai), ask them if this thing can piggyback on their account, then make them do it anyway when they throw up a political barrier. Then, then stop sweating it, turn keepalive on and ignore anything below this line. Otherwise:
If this is on a VPS, make sure it has guaranteed memory and I/O resources – otherwise host it on a hardware machine. If you’re paranoid, something with a 10k RPM drive and 2-3 gigs of ram will do (memory for apache and mysql to have breathing room and hard drive for unexpected swap file compensation.)
Make sure the 317k/w figure is accurate:
Apache: News sites in America have lunchtime and workday winddown traffic bursts around or about 11 am, and 4 pm, so you may want to turn Keepalive off (having it on will improve things during slow traffic periods, but during burst times the machine will spin into an unrecoverable state.)
PHP: Make sure some kind of opcode caching is enabled on the hosting machine (either APC or eAccelerator). With opcode caching, memory footprint drops off significantly and machine doesn’t have to borrow as much from the swap file – hard drive.
WP: Make sure you use WP3.4, as ticket http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10964 was closed in favor of this ticket’s fix: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/18536. Both longstanding issues address query performances on large volume sites, but the overall improvements/fixes help everywhere else too.
Secondly, make sure to use something like the WP Super Cache caching plugin and configure it appropriately. If volume of content on this site is going to be permanently small, you shouldn’t have to take any special precautions – otherwise you may want to alter the plugin/rules so to permanently archive older content into a static file. There is no reason why 2 year old content should be constantly respidered at full resource cost.
Robots.txt: prepare and properly register a dynamic sitemap with google/bing/etc. If you expect posts to be unnecessarily peppered with a bunch of tags and categories by people who don’t understand what they actually do, you may want to Disallow
/page/*,/category/*and/tag/*. Otherwise, when spider robots swarm the site, for every post you’ll be slammed by an amount increased by number of tags/cats it has. And then some.For several years The Baltimore Sun hosted their reader reward, sports and editorial database projects directly off a single collocated machine. Combined traffic volume was factors larger than what you mention, but adequately met.
Here’s a video of httpd status w/keepalive on during a slow hour, at about 30 req./sec: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAHz4GRY0WM#t=09
I would not exclude WordPress for this project based only off of the weekly pageview of < a million. I have hosted WordPress sites that receive much, much more traffic and were still very functional. Whether or not WordPress is the best solution for this type of project though based off of the other criteria you have is completely up to you.
Best of luck and happy coding!
WP is capable of handling huge traffic. See this list of people who are using WP VIP services:
Time,DowJones,NBC Sprts,CNN and many more.
Visit WordPress VIP site: http://vip.wordpress.com/clients/