I have a Wordpress blog on a reseller hosting package that has lots of images.
The site <snip>link deleted</<snip> gets 2000 visitor/day on average and I’m afraid the resources allocated to my hosting package is no longer sufficient. It keeps getting the CPU heavy usage warning and the hosting company continues to limit cpu time for my site.
I would love to get a VPS, but it’s pretty costly and I was wondering if I could get by for now by using CDN. Since my blog is image heavy, perhaps loading them from a CDN would lessen the load on my server and thereby decreasing the CPU usage?
Would this be a waste of money? Or can it be a good middle step before moving to a VPS? With Amazon or MaxCDN, a $40 package would more than suffice for my site. Would love to get the opinions of the pros. Thank you all for your help.
Offloading images to a cdn will save on bandwidth but won’t make much difference to cpu consumption. Your first optimisation should be to install a wordpress cache plugin to reduce the cpu used in generating each page.
Thanks for the reply. I have W3 Total Cache already installed and it definitely has improved the site loading speed. However, other than enabling the object cache, I have left every other settings as default. So right now the plug-in has Page Cache, Object Cache, and Browser Cache enabled.
I tried the Minify option following instructions from the web, but I gave up after 3 tries because it messes my site up. Do you recommend I use any other settings on the plug-in? So far, every instruction I followed on the web hasn’t produced better result than the default setting + ticking the ‘Object Cache’ option.
Look into some caching plugins for Wordpress, these should help you reduce the load of the site on the server. If they claim CPU, shifting images elsewhere won’t make much difference - straight file serving should be quite quick and easy.
If they are moaning about bandwidth usage, then yes, moving them will help
Hello, maybe you have some watermarking thingy auto applying to your images? I mean some people using watermarks to brand their photos, and alot of people just using it all the times (watermark applying to image when it going to show), so the server load is insanely high. To minimize it just rewrite the upload script to watermark it once when upload finishes. Not just everytime when the picture is going to show up/… Or just move to other hosting company and get VPS. but there is other problem - you need to know your visitors locations good - just choose the hosting in country where is a most of users you get to your site. Hope it will help… As i see youre in europe - i like hetzner… fair prices, many options, many OSes to choose from.
The OP said that he has many static files. So, CDN will serve that best. Even if you go for a VPS it will be based out of a particular location. Also, it has to be processed by apache which will increase the load on VPS.
