62% hosting cost reduction for news portal on WordPress

From the very beginning, the Client operated with a simple WordPress blog supported by one technical specialist. Everything changed in 2019, when COVID-19 happened, since news about the pandemic brought insane traffic to the website. In the meantime, WordPress couldn't withstand thousands of views per minute. It caused constant breakages and downtime, leading to revenue loss from premium content. Endpoints News decided to empower the existing WordPress site with auto scaling.

Before OpsWorks Co., Endpoints News was hosted by a provider that enabled scaling. But the site couldn't withstand the constantly increasing traffic and started failing. That solution cost the Client $4K per month, making it utterly inefficient due to the inability to serve all users simultaneously.

The OpsWorks Co. team built a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster and deployed WordPress there. K8s provides auto-scaling according to WordPress and database size without involving code. While Kubernetes takes responsibility for the 'auto' part, AWS allows the platform to scale with its server capacity infinitely.

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Consequently, this solution helped the Client to ensure:

- Online system availability during traffic spikes;

- Automatic scaling from 1K users to 20K users and back;

- Reduced latency for better user experience;

- Advanced security and backup options.

It was essential for Endpoints News to have a solution that would allow it to adjust hosting fees due to the computing power used. The upgraded AWS-WP platform allowed the Client to break even in less than eight months without paying idle fees due to the pay-as-you-go model on AWS. The company reduced hosting costs from $4K to $1.5K monthly, getting scalability and uptime.