Thank you. I’ve been working hard to get it optimized.
We are a very tiny non-profit and usually get little web traffic. Recently, we had an event where 400 near simultaneous users attempted to access the site to sign up for registration (a WPFORM). I was surprised to see that the hosting provider (AWS lightsail) couldn’t handle it. So I’ve been doing everything possible to optimize, including implementing our first CDN.
Thanks for the reply, BTW. I really don’t do a lot of WP for scale…mostly small sites. But I used to be a Director doing enterprise infrastructure, and designing for scalability was my thing back then.
I’ve a few things to figure out yet with Cloudfront/W3TC: Does purge trigger a purge of Cloudfront or just the Apache servers (W3TC/WP) cache?
Is there a way to add versioning to file names or assets with a plugin so that updated assets published are newly populated to Cloudfront? (We use BigCommerce. When files are uploaded into their media library, they all get an asset link with a version that helps ensure refreshed assets are used.
How do I ensure old/unused assets are dropped out of cloudfront or doesn’t that matter?
How can I ensure that Cloudfront helps RE: DDOS and other threats.
I was going to look into Cloudflare, but chose not to for quite a few reasons that I won’t get into here. But besides my main requirement (scalability, asset caching), is protection. I’ve not yet figured that out with CLoudfront.
These are some things I’m still working on. I’m also trying to do some load testing using jmeter (I don’t have access to LoadRunner) to test the newly CDN-optimized site for scale. I’m sure we won’t really get much in the way of traffic anytime soon. But I’m hoping the recent reconfiguration, use of W3TC/Cloudfront, gives me a bit more scale. I don’t know how AWS Lightsail can be boosted (if at all) given load/demand. I don’t know that it’s fixed or scalable as a service.
Anyways, thanks for the reply. Got some more to do yet. But it’s improving.