Many of our blog readers ask if we offer tuning services and support remote server management. At this time we do not offer server management services and we do not offer blog tuning either. However, from time to time we work with a nice company called LinuxAdmin guys and they do high-load and critical blog set-up,  configuration,  load balancing, management and of course full optimization. So if you are looking for a quality and very affordable remote server management or Wordpress blog hosting and management company – contact LinuxAdmin and I am sure you guys can work something out.

Many website owners are dreaming about hundreds of thousands of web visitors and thousands in ad profits, but will your web site handle the load and keep up the file serving? Probably not.

Digg frontpage listing usually sends 120.000  to 170.000 web visitors in two to three hours. It depends for how long you are listed on Digg’s frontpage and what is the topic.  In over 95% of cases this will probably be too much for simple dedicated server – if you are hosting Wordpress blog with some plugins activated (that require some extra load) and without tuning the server box.

You can activate some caching plugins (wp-cache, wp-super-cache, 1blogcacher), configure more efficient content distribution (for example, use lightweight web daemon to serve static files), use less includes and optimize plugin code for performance. This will probably handle the Digg frontpage load.

What if you land Yahoo! frontpage listing? This will be a real challenge for your systems and system administrator. Yahoo! is very popular and if your site gets listed in frontpage they can easily “send you” a few million of web visitors. Once again, depends for how long the listing will stay on the front page. Yahoo! traffic burst will definitely make your web server unreachable and I am saying this with 99.9999% confidence. You need multiple servers to handle  the load and do load balancing, and of course have upstream bandwidth available to serve the content. You need to employ perfect caching architecture, preferable keeping the page 100% static and load it in the server memory for super fast serving to web visitors. If you read it from the hard drive – your servers will experience very high IO and load, thus slowing down web responses.

Last time when one of our client’s got listed on Yahoo! frontpage the site (actually a blog) got around ~900.000 unique visitor landings, over 200.000 visitors browsed site further reading other articles and comments.  The traffic burst from two web front-end servers serving the content was close to 195Mbps (2 x 100Mbps links were fully maxed out) and I am talking about serving HTML/PHP content, not the images from these servers.

This is why you need to plan architecture to be scalable (horizontally) and easily affordable. One server box will not make it even if you get top-notch mega box for 20k USD, period.

Ok folks, I have some great news for you – we just spot a promising wordpress caching plugin named 1 Blog Cacher.  From the list of features it looks very awesome including the file and directory structure emulation, thus you can easily remove cached directories or file cache that you require. This is a nice feature if you are using  scripts  (e.g. you want to wipe out all cache files for /2006/ directory).

Expire header option is also a very nice feature – you have full control when to expire the cache.

I am sure we will use this plugin for some in-house tests and then use it on some high load blogs we manage for our clientele. We will keep you posted!

In a previous post server virtualization vs dedicated server we discussed about increasing availability using virtual servers – hypervisors that offer Live migration in case of one virtual server failure.

Citrix has released free XenServer product that includes Live Migration feature free of charge. Very good news for low budget and small sites that require high-availability at no cost. You just need two hypervisor servers and configure Live Migration feature and you have high-availability. Check it out it’s free and you can download it straight away for in-house testing.