Hi! I run a Buddy Boss and LearnDash site. Those are very performance-intensive plugins and the BoddyBoss theme is pretty heavyweight too. We have a $2k a month WPEngine server running those plugins and our performance is just ok. That is just the realities of running a social media site where almost nothing can be cached. If you want to save money, your best bet is to set up your own infrastructure in Google Cloud or AWS. Take advantage of managed databases, auto-scaling groups, using S3 with a CDN for uploads, and see if you can use Redis and Elastisearch to speed up db queries. You will achieve a lot more performance for cheaper, but it is a pain to manage all that infrastructure. That's why we just ended up paying WPEnging a lot more money to do that for us.
I've actually moved the site three times in two weeks from Kinsta to WPEngine and now to Flywheel, which is part of WPE getflywheel.com/
The cost to performance makes me a little happier. I also am considering using Learnpress with Edu theme. I have an example of this setup as well now and I am much more impressed. docspress.thimpress.com/eduma/
I still feel like we will end up using Next.js to create our own frontend and this WordPress setup for our backend. The blog, Tutorials can be static builds and the rest of the bbpress and things can run more dynamic.
Hi! I run a Buddy Boss and LearnDash site. Those are very performance-intensive plugins and the BoddyBoss theme is pretty heavyweight too. We have a $2k a month WPEngine server running those plugins and our performance is just ok. That is just the realities of running a social media site where almost nothing can be cached. If you want to save money, your best bet is to set up your own infrastructure in Google Cloud or AWS. Take advantage of managed databases, auto-scaling groups, using S3 with a CDN for uploads, and see if you can use Redis and Elastisearch to speed up db queries. You will achieve a lot more performance for cheaper, but it is a pain to manage all that infrastructure. That's why we just ended up paying WPEnging a lot more money to do that for us.
I've actually moved the site three times in two weeks from Kinsta to WPEngine and now to Flywheel, which is part of WPE
getflywheel.com/
The cost to performance makes me a little happier. I also am considering using Learnpress with Edu theme. I have an example of this setup as well now and I am much more impressed.
docspress.thimpress.com/eduma/
I still feel like we will end up using Next.js to create our own frontend and this WordPress setup for our backend. The blog, Tutorials can be static builds and the rest of the bbpress and things can run more dynamic.
I've actually just read through this as well and might try out my own hosting setup to tune perf more.
Best Practices for Running WordPress on AWS using CDK
Mike Ng ・ Oct 31 ・ 11 min read