Hi,
So I have a niche website which gets about 50k visits per month and it's hosted on hostinger.
It has potential to reach 10mil+ if I build a team and scale. My question is can a WordPress website hosted on hostinger support this scale?
Or is it better for me to switch to a tech stack like MERN. Thanks
Notably the White House website
And The New York Times & Time Magazine
NYT’s main site does not use WordPress. They have a completely custom CMS called Scoop. Some of their blogs do, though. https://open.nytimes.com/scoop-a-glimpse-into-the-nytimes-cms-ae54b266d018
https://10up.com/our-work/ for a bunch of good sites. Their github is amazing and full of resources.
The weirdest thing is that website looks kinda shit, but their work is good.
A lot of US gov sites are switching to WP from Drupal.
Source? Obama had WH.gov on drupal, Trump put it back on WP, and Biden continued it.
A lot of their Drupal sites were out of date and Drupal basically required a site rebuild to upgrade versions. They paid a specialty Drupal development/ hosting company to do this for some, but if you're going to rebuild anyway WP is way easier to maintain and find support for. So there was a big push for WP.
Edit: Source: Am govt contractor.
Worked at a contractor who did both Drupal and WordPress... the more I worked with Drupal, the more I liked WordPress. There's a reason WP has 30x the market share of Drupal.
Primarily because google made a statement once, that using wordpress would benefit in SEO. That however is a big phat myth now and outdated. But wordpress is horrible. I would like to see world wide stats in regards of hacks, exploits, bad traffic. It must be terrible.
I too have rebuilt many Drupal sites into WP.
Sadly this is true of Joomla! Both knock seven shades out of WP technically, but betamax proved that market pressure is more important than good.
I used to build sites in Joomla and Drupal, I now build all of them in WP.
Yeah, my world too
Those are proxied; meaning all cached and in between a CDN. Without it it would likely chrash.
That has nothing to do with what it’s built on.
It's being converted to static on deploy, no?
This
Ars Technica (30M+ traffic) is on Wordpress and they have excellent and detailed articles on how they make it work. First article is here, I think there's 4 total.
The same author also has an article or two on how he does it for a smaller site - spacecityweather? - that can get massive spikes, also well worth a look.
Thanks for this.
How much traffic website can handle depends first from hosting. If your hosring cann't scale polroperlt, it doesn't matter if you use WordPress or not.
WordPress.com gets 20M to 40M visits a day, and there are plenty of very high traffic WP websites around.
It would be good to optimize WP regardless of server, but server has to be capable of handling high traffic.
With a decent dedicated environment - sure
WordPress is not your problem, the hosting service is your problem. We run WordPress on wordpress.org. We get hundreds of millions of hits a day.
Granted it is a very strong hosting system, but scaling is more a matter of your hosting service than the software is.
My shop uses a front-end wordpress.org hosted site along with dns subdomains pointing to cloud-based infrastructure and resources where we do CI/CD pipelines, back-end processing (of GB's of data per hour), lots of db "fun stuff", modeling, etc.
WordPress is fine it just creates threads as needed as everyone else said it's just the underlying resources you need to worry about. Probably best to go with ecs, you want something scalable like kubernetes dynamically allocating resources. It's way cheaper than running a very large server.
Yes, fairly straightforward to scale on something like EKS. We are running multiple replicas of each of our sites across multiple az just because we can. With pilot light disaster recovery to another AWS region.
doing 10 million visits is more about your server homie
Can WordPress? Absolutely can handle it.
Cam your hosting package? Who knows? Better look into it a bit.
Hostinger can - but you'll likely have to upgrade unless you're already in the Cloud Enterprise tier.
WP can handle it.
Host infrastructure has to be “scaled” to handle it. Throwing more CPU or RAM will not help; you need good system admin here to set it (managed database, redundant DNS, load balancer, object/block storage, OP cache, web server etc). It's not a trivial task.
I do not have experience with Hostinger; so take my advice with grain of salt; I think you need some of "big sharks" like Vultr, Linode, DigitalOcean.
Success.
Do you have any resources I can follow to learn how to manage database, redundant DNS, load balancer, etc within WordPress?thanks
Not possible to manage these within WordPress.
It will take months to learn what you need (with good mentor). You need seasoned SysOp/system administrator. And good host.
Read https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/performance/; it covers most of the issues. For the rest: https://codex.wordpress.org/High_Traffic_Tips_For_WordPress
Some nice read and podcast:
https://www.linode.com/content/rutledge-daugette/
(I am not Linode's affiliate)
He has about 2 mil hits a month. On single server. So, it's possible, if you know what you're doing.
Thanks 🙏
I can recommend Linode VPS (8Gb/160GB) and turnkey WP on the top of NGNIX (https://www.linode.com/marketplace/apps/linode/wordpress/) and upscale from there; with some fine-tuning of nginx (cache, http3).
Just mu 2 cents.
Success.
To make DO simple, just Cloudways. I host my clients on Cloudways and it is a dream. Rocket is better but the price jump is huge at the start. 1 client hosts on Rocket and the performance is excellent.
I would rather go direct to DigitalOcean. Why do you need middleman?
Anyhow, my recommendation for OP would be Linode VPS (8Gb/160GB) and turnkey WP on the top of NGNIX (https://www.linode.com/marketplace/apps/linode/wordpress/) and upscale from there.
For, simplicity.
Managed VPS is nice concept, I admit. Still, I prefer to do it myself. But, for OP it can be valid option.
This. A 16GB Linode + Nginx server will handle a ton of traffic - likely more than OP will need for quite a while. Once that maxes out, get a 32GB server. At some point, you'll need to start scaling horizontally.
OP: Presumably you're running business - if you're getting 1mil users per month, you should be earning enough to pay for a SysOp/DevOps person. This isn't something most web developers are capable of.
Worry about that when it happens.
Hostinger I've found to be decent but it's the number of concurrent users you need to service.
Totally depends on your host. Choose WPVIP or Pagely if you need no hastle for that much traffic. All my clients with that much traffic use WPVIP.
Regardless of hosting, everyone missed the main factor which is code. Type of theme you are using or bloating your Wordpress with unnecessary plugins. If you are expecting high traffic you can invest in optimised theme built for your requirements, It truly does wonders.
Does it make more sense to also build your own plugins once you scale?
Using plugins for back end functionalities can be helpful from developers with lean code. Anything related to front end can be developed into one single plugin where your systems for website reside, Every use case if different and i hope you find solution you are looking for.
can a WordPress website
Yes. Plenty of huge sites run WP.
hosted on hostinger
Probably not.
the CMS isn't the limiting factor here when it comes to traffic - at the end of the day it's just serving up HTML to browsers and it doesn't really matter of 1 person sees it or a million, it's the same web page/code. Your hosting provider is what you need to check with when it comes to traffic.
Now. If you're saying I want to re-create amazon... will wordpress work? That doesn't really have to do with the amount of traffic amazon gets and more to do with the internal structure of the site/database/etc.... so I'd say no, probably need a custom built/optimized CMS for something that vast and complex.
Theoretically, with good caching and a good CDN you could have that much traffic on a Hostinger site if (but only if) it there was little or no user interaction beyond reading content.
In my experience with clients with the potential to reach 10mil+ monthly visits you'll have plenty of time to scale. A 200x jump in traffic rarely happens overnight. Or in a year.
The "good" news is that in the grand scheme of things the technical cost and effort to increase traffic even 20x is usually dwarfed by the time and money spent marketing, generating content, and engaging with visitors. The actual good news is that typically by the time you've built up that much traffic up your revenues will have also grown to the point that boosting your hosting is pretty easy.
There are a number of providers that specialize in hosting Wordpress at scale. As others have mentioned there are Wordpress sites out there that get extremely high traffic.
If your hosting can handle it and your website is structured well, it shouldn't be a problem. Back in the day when I had zero experience, my first websites where built with many unnecessary plugins and horrible code. Even a great hosting plan couldn't save those projects from crashing when they had a lot of traffic.
These days I try to use plugins as little as possible, while making sure my code and markup are clean and well structured. Combine that with a good server including some speed optimization (tools) and it's ready to handle heavy traffic.
Yeah just need a manage hosting service or someone who knows how to manage a server
It should be your hosting...
I worked for a newsmedia company that averaged 180m views per day with around 4m news articles but you have to optimize and scale everything from the hosting, server and code. In this case we were running on wp vip and we had implement very sophisticated data caching and memorization techniques. Many people probably doubt that WordPress can scale to enterprise level but for a content heavy site, it's probably one of the best and safest option.
That’s the wrong question. Don’t ask if your CMS can handle the traffic. All CMSs can scale.
Ask if your infrastructure can handle it. I can assure you the answer is no. You will need to build out an infrastructure customized to your needs. The database, the object caching, the static asset caching, the DNS protection, the HTTP server, all these things require smart decisions to scale up. There is no out of the box solution. But you can do it.
10m monthly is nothing. I think you should be focusing on concurrent users and not visits or sessions.
Set a number there, stress test your system (duplicate your live env with similar settings and hosting).
And then optimize from there.
The New York Post runs on WordPress. You figure to generate more traffic than they do?
Use CDN
Why Not?
Real question should be, can your Hosting handle?
WordPress can handle a website with 10 million+ monthly visits, but it's crucial to optimize your setup, especially hosting and database management.
Hostinger can support high traffic if you upgrade to higher-tier plans like VPS or cloud hosting. For database optimization, consider implementing caching strategies, using a CDN, and regular maintenance to ensure efficiency.
While switching to a tech stack like MERN offers more control and scalability, it requires building from scratch. If WordPress meets your needs and your team is familiar with it, optimizing your current setup might be more cost-effective.
Yes, just don’t build it using bad plugins.
I run my store on a VM in my cloud cluster (bare metal with xcpng) Can scale it, migrate it do whatever I want with it really But it comes at a cost of having fairly advanced skills to main it, learn VMs etc but the WordPress platform itself can handle a lot
At some point, Automattic's infrastructure handled more than 1 billion requests from nasa.gov in 4.5 hours. NASA.gov is built running on WordPress. So, does that answer your question?
I've built Callaway Golf and Swiss Army (Victorinox) on WordPress. As well as multiple other 1M/mo+ websites. However, I would switch to (in order of preference) Skystra, WPEngine, Kinsta, or WordPress.com, if you're serious about traffic.
Furthermore, with that much data passthrough, what are you doing analytically to optimize?
Nothing.. I'm new to all of this. I did setup Google analytics but I only check the bounce rates and I'm happy with the increase in visits. It would be great if you could share some tips or resources I can follow to optimize analytics. Thankyou
Anyways, good luck and congrats on the traffic.
Yes they can, but maybe at that volume you should consider Wordpress Vip service rather than creating your own stack.
"Can X handle a website with [huge number] of user ?" Yeah if you have the infrastructures, in your case if your Host Can handle it.
The X technology, in this case WordPress will just make it cost more or less depending on how it work. In WordPress case, as long as you stay light in plugin, using only stuffs that are really usefull and you keep using native WordPress whenever you can, yeah, it would work.
Switching to a MERN stack would provide more scalability for a high-traffic website and you have more control over customization, performance optimization, and flexibility. But, keep in mind that moving to a new tech stack requires development expertise
I suggest switching to a dedicated server instead of relying on hostinger
May good providers are Hetzner Contabo
They have reasonable price server and you have complete control
If Hostinger is shared hosting then you should migrate to a dedicated server and add in CDN. If you've never scaled a WordPress instance then get some professional help.
yes you can, but you need to setup a custom server that address a few things :
there are still quite a few more but once these 4 handled properly, you should be able to start scaling up :)
Yes.
ARS Technica did a nice series of articles on how they setup WordPress using elastic kubernetes service (ECS), Fargate, etc.
Absolutely! WordPress itself can handle 10 million+ monthly visits. The key is choosing the right hosting solution. With a solid managed WordPress host and performance optimization, your site can scale to handle massive traffic volumes. CDN integration, and other tweaks to ensure your WordPress site stays lightning fast for your visitors.
Check your hosting if it has a dedicated server plan. If not, switch to other hosting that has one. Better check the server specs.
yup it definitely can. giving you properly define your optimization and hosting
Look, if WordPress can handle Brown University, the White House, Beyonce, Snoop Dogg, the Rolling Stones, Sylvester Stallone, NASA, CNN, I'm pretty sure it can handle your brilliant idea for a business. The hosting is up to you. If you think one day you're going to have ten million visits, you would expect that you'd also one day start to make 10+ more money and simply be able to invest in top-level hosting. So WordPress can handle it. The host probably not but you're not at 10 million hits per month yet. If you get to half of that, spring for better hosting.
I manage a few sites that have a couple of million visits per month. Not a problem. Hosting is your main concern.
I was originally using WPVIP but they are very expensive, currently testing out cloudways at a fraction of the cost and so far all good.
Some interesting case studies: https://wpvip.com/case-studies/
It depends on your hosting provider if they allow you to upgrade or capable of handling that much traffic.
WordPress relies heavily on caching, I doubt a simple WordPress installation will be able to handle such traffic without a proper architectural design, powerful servers or even using plugins. Remember WordPress and PHP is not the problem. Most of the time It’s how you scale your database servers since a single request to the server can do more that 500 db queries
I think people still underestimate wordpress lol
BBC, New York Times etc
sure will do
WordPress can handle it easy. As long as your hosting is sufficient.
WordPress is built on php. PHP doesn't care how many requests there are, it's the web server that has to handle/thread the request. Mainly focus on having the right server infrastructure. Remember, the more traffic or popular you get the more you'll be exposed to attacks, meaning you'll need to implement a serious security system.
Thanks.. where can I start to learn to deploy a proper security system?
You can try courses on Udemy. There are many courses on how to use Linux and how to implement security.
If you’ve got to ask then you’re not generating that much traffic.
Sure it can, there's some huge websites out there that run wordpress. The question is can your hosting can handle it.