News Summary Space City Weather recently faced significant challenges with their hosting solution after moving to OpenLiteSpeed. High traffic events caused server strain, leading to database errors and non-responsiveness. Ultimately, they reverted to Nginx for improved reliability. This journey emphasized the complexity of web hosting and the need for informed technology decisions. Hosting Challenges: A Look at Space City Weather’s Recent Journey Space City Weather (SCW) is a beloved Houston-area weather forecasting site that has been bringing reliable weather updates to the community since 2017. Co-hosted by Eric Berger and his colleague, the site has garnered a solid daily following, with 20,000-30,000 page views and 10,000-15,000 unique visitors each day. However, this number can shoot up dramatically to over one million page views in just 12 hours during severe weather events, like hurricanes. With that much traffic, ensuring the site runs smoothly is essential. A Complex Hosting Stack Initially, SCW operated with a rather complex hosting setup involving HAProxy, Varnish Cache, and Nginx, all protected by Cloudflare. This powerful combination was effective, but as time passed, it became apparent that there was a need for simplification. The Move to OpenLiteSpeed About two years ago, to make their lives a bit easier, SCW made a brave move by shifting to OpenLiteSpeed (OLS). This platform is well-regarded in the WordPress community, thanks to its streamlined caching capabilities. However, the transition brought about its own set of hurdles, especially with its GUI configuration that made managing things a bit trickier. During this switch, SCW faced compatibility issues between Cloudflare’s WordPress plugin and LiteSpeed Cache, which resulted in some frustrating moments. A continuous struggle with cache invalidation made things more complicated, especially as new posts and comments often led to unintended cache refreshes. What began as an effort to simplify turned into quite the juggling act! Performance Issues Arise For nearly two years, the new system seemed to be holding strong. Then came a particular cold front that captured Eric Berger’s interest. Following his post about it, SCW was slammed with traffic, causing it to become non-responsive at a completely critical moment. The server’s CPU usage surged to 100%, and its load averaged around 15 during this spike. This led to frustrating database connection errors which only compounded the chaos. It soon became clear that OLS was struggling to manage such high traffic loads effectively, even after extensive troubleshooting efforts. Changes to PHP settings and Cloudflare configurations were made in hopes of stabilizing the situation, but unfortunately, these attempts fell flat. Back to Basics with Nginx Due to ongoing issues and a growing lack of trust in OpenLiteSpeed, SCW made the decision to revert back to Nginx, a reliable old friend that had served them well since 2011. This switch was essential for ensuring the site’s functionality and reliability, especially during anticipated traffic peaks. Alongside Nginx, they implemented PHP-FPM and PHP 8.3 to better manage their PHP processes and minimize issues going forward. Lessons Learned This whole rollercoaster journey has been a real eye-opener for SCW in terms of managing web servers. It’s a perfect reminder of the complexities of hosting and the importance of making informed decisions when it comes to our technology choices. Sometimes, holding onto what has always worked is the best way to go! As Space City Weather presses on, they now have a renewed focus on ensuring their hosting solutions meet the growing needs of their community and are prepared for whatever weather challenges lie ahead. Deeper Dive: News & Info About This Topic Ars Technica: I Abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and Went Back to Good Ol’ Nginx ScienceDirect: Hosting Infrastructure Performance SitePoint: How to Use Varnish and Cloudflare for Maximum Caching The Hacker News: CDN Cache Poisoning DoS Attack Space City Weather: Lee’s Posts Wikipedia: Web Hosting Service Google Search: Web Hosting Challenges Google Scholar: Web Hosting Performance Encyclopedia Britannica: Website Google News: Hosting Solutions
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