Built to scale, or worry later?

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I’m starting a service that offers websites that runs on a giant WordPress multi-site. I have a cloud based vps with nginx-php5-php-fpm-mysql. Storage with Amazon S3, distribution with MaxCDN. WP Total cache takes care of this for WP. I do expect to be busy from the start as far as the number of sites created. My question is about mysql replication.

  1. Should I go ahead and create two more VPS’s now, and have one as master and one as slave from the get go? Or, is this something that can be done when it’s time to scale? I worry about the size of the db and incomplete backups.

  2. With, currently no service launched and 0 signups, should I even be worrying about this? What # of sites created would justify scaling wordpress?

I want to start this off the right way and not have to deal with expanding down the road.

Thoughts?
Nick

1 Answer
1

Have a look into how WordPress.com do it – they released all the software they use under open licensing, and it’ll let you scale up in future as you need it – far as I know, DB replication is pretty easy to build in. If in doubt, email Matt (ma.tt) – the WP team are super-friendly and will point you in the right direction.

Alternatively, have a look at wpmudev.org – it isn’t free, but it looks like you have a decent budget for what you’re doing anyway – they have DB replication stuff for WP Multisite.

On the whole though, WordPress is pretty robust, especially with caching, so until you reach the top end of utilisation of your current box, I wouldn’t bother.

EDIT: in hindsight, this doesn’t fully answer your question. Keep a close eye on your load levels, that’ll tell you when it’s time to move up. The rest of this ^ is probably information you already know.

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