The major issue I've had with wp is the speed. I don't know if it's a php problem or a wp problem, but running wp on shit-tier commodity hardware results in a complete inability for your site to be {hn'd/slashdotted/dugg/whatever} due to the ~500ms page generation times (that only increase with any plugins at all). The caching plugins mostly resolve this, but still not well enough to be accessible during a wave of pageviews.
It seems like unless you're willing to pay for managed wp hosting (or fancy hardware), you can't expect more than 10 pageviews/s to be handled. This makes me sad.
You can up the performance pretty significantly with caching at various levels. My experience was the plugins don't do as much as something like putting nginx in front. http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2013/08/29/reverse-proxy-and-ca... what I put in front of it, handles reddit/hn/digg whatever just fine as far as I can tell.
Caching somewhere above WordPress seems to do wonders, things like Memcache, Varnish, etc.
Also, some of the companies I was comparing are charging <$10/month and outperforming some of the bigger brand names like WPEngine (SiteGround and GoDaddy for instance). I suspect if they gain traction with their products, they could push the price down on entry level managed wordpress hosting.
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The major issue I've had with wp is the speed. I don't know if it's a php problem or a wp problem, but running wp on shit-tier commodity hardware results in a complete inability for your site to be {hn'd/slashdotted/dugg/whatever} due to the ~500ms page generation times (that only increase with any plugins at all). The caching plugins mostly resolve this, but still not well enough to be accessible during a wave of pageviews.
It seems like unless you're willing to pay for managed wp hosting (or fancy hardware), you can't expect more than 10 pageviews/s to be handled. This makes me sad.
You can up the performance pretty significantly with caching at various levels. My experience was the plugins don't do as much as something like putting nginx in front. http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2013/08/29/reverse-proxy-and-ca... what I put in front of it, handles reddit/hn/digg whatever just fine as far as I can tell.
Caching somewhere above WordPress seems to do wonders, things like Memcache, Varnish, etc.
Also, some of the companies I was comparing are charging <$10/month and outperforming some of the bigger brand names like WPEngine (SiteGround and GoDaddy for instance). I suspect if they gain traction with their products, they could push the price down on entry level managed wordpress hosting.