Wordpress Max Speed

We already pay $120 a month for our VPS, and host 31 active websites for ourselves and a few others for friends. When Google articles about site speed started to gain popularity we examined our total cost of ownership relative to revenue and time.

Amazon CloudFront has no minimum commitments and charges you only for what you use. Compared to hosting files yourself, Amazon CloudFront spares you from the expense and complexity of operating a network of cache servers in multiple sites across the internet and eliminates the need to over-provision capacity in order to serve potential spikes in traffic.

While that sounds great, we actually only had one server. While one of our websites has over 100,000 page views per month we certainly didn’t have a “network” of cached servers.

Amazon CloudFront charges are based on actual usage of the service in three areas: the origin server (Amazon S3), Data Transfer and Requests. Amazon has no up front fees, minimum useage, etc. Total cost is relative to your website traffic.

OK, so what is going to cost you? Amazon says data transfer rates are $0.150 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out, from US locations. Locations in the EU and Japan are a little higher. I’m no math wizard, but I concluded that even with our websites Amazon S3 and Amazon Cloud Front would not cost us very much.

We put one high traffic website on Amazon and our cost is still less than $2 a month. Traffic hits our server, starts WordPress, goes to W3 Total Cache for routing information, and pulls much of our information from Amazon Cloud Front.

As for our VPS, CPU load rarely goes above 1.5 while memory use averages around 350 meg. Visitors, however, get our website anywhere in the world in half the time it took to load before.

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