Luckily, industrious coders have created several solutions to this problem, and you can be serving thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages per day without a problem. The easiest to impliment solution is “caching”. Since most of your WordPress pages and posts are not changing second by second, they don’t need to be made “fresh” every time someone asks for them. Instead, you create a “flat” html file that you can send to people who ask for your page. This is great because it eliminates the need for WordPress to go back and forth to the database. If you’re on shared hosting and your site speed is suffering, this is the fastest easiest way to see dramatic improvements as shared hosting is notorious for having slow databases.

The plugin to most easily accomplish this is called WP Super Cache. It creates flat files it serves and if a page changes, it will generate a new flat file just as soon as it can. There is even a mode called, “Lockdown” that you can enable to see even higher performance gains. This is really important if you’re trying to squeeze every last bit of power out of your server — something you’d be doing if you hit the front page of Digg or had a post go hot on Slashdot. These sites will send vast amounts of traffic very quickly and can crash your server if you have WordPress configured out of the box.

Perhaps you’ve got a pretty popular website with lots of pictures. Your site is speedy, but the pictures are slow to load and are starting to use up a lot of bandwidth. This can be an expensive problem not just in terms of hosting bills. If customers are getting impatient for pictures to load, you’re potentially losing visitors to nothing other than poor attention span. You could have the best website in the world, but if it’s slow people will leave. Google has gone out on a limb to support this fact. They now include your site speed as one of the factors determining your ranking on their search engine.

The answer to large files could be a Virtual Dedicated Server AKA Virtual Private Server, or it could be a CDN (Content Delivery Network). The advantage to using a content delivery network is that you can stay with your current host, and just use the CDN for hosting the high bandwidth items. One of the best CDN’s is Amazon S3, or Simple Storage System. They have datacenters all over the world with huge pipes to the internet, ready to serve out your pictures, video, or audio at a moments notice, all the while you remain on your shared hosting. The advantage to this approach is that you get to use the “Costco” model of hosting: because you’re buying in bulk (With thousands of others), the prices are dirt cheap. S3 prices start at .15/GB for storage and .15/GB for transfer. I’ve gotten bills from amazon for $0.36 for a whole month of hosting. Since you’re only paying for what you use, it can be very cost effective.

Taking all of your pages and moving all your pictures can be a very complicated process. To expedite this, there is a phenomenal plugin called W3 Total Cache. It has all the features of WP Super Cache to make flat files, but it will also serve as a liaison between WordPress and Amazon; automatically uploading your images to Amazon as you upload them to WordPress. Additionally, it will replace all the link you’ve created to locally hosted files with their S3 URL’s. If you ever decide to turn off the plugin, your page just goes back to the way it was on your shared hosting. The performance between hosting with Amazon S3 and shared hosting can be orders of magnitude different.

Enter Google. Google was the first company to really popularize the cloud. Instead of buying “enterprise” grade computer, they decided they’d use commodity computer hardware that was readily available, and cheap. Because these computers are more prone to failure under heavy load, they needed a way to insure they wouldn’t be losing any data when these computer inevitably gave up the ghost. They wrote a program that each of the computers runs called the Google File System. It says, in essence: Each piece of data must be stored in no less than 3 places, each on separate computers, on separate networks. This way no matter what kind of failure condition there is, the data will still exist and be accessible. This approach was so radical that many people shunned it, until it starting working really well for Google. Once that happened, companies with lots of resources started asking themselves, “Why not us?”

If you use Gmail, or many of the other Google services, you are using Google’s cloud computer, but beyond this, they never opened up their resources for the public. Amazon, the internet retailer of books, electronics, and just about everything else took the exact opposite approach: We have all this computing power, if you want some of it, we’ll sell you how ever much you’d like, at an insanely cheap price. Other companies have followed suit and now Cloud hosting and Cloud computing are the hot buzzwords you’ll see. The advantages of hosting “in the cloud” are:

• Greater reliability
• Scale. If you get hit with 2 million visitors, no problem, just buy more space “in the cloud”.
• Redundancy. Since your data is stored multiple places, it’s backed up before it’s been backed up.
• Speed. The cloud is HUGE and able to serve things very quickly.
• Cost. Since the infrastructure is already there, and you’re buying only what you use, it can be very cheap to host in the cloud. I got a hosting bill from Amazon for $.03 last month.

• Price – If your website gets 1.1 million hits/day but you only have a $20 hosting budget, this will pose a problem.
• Support – Every second your site is down you’re losing time, money, and branding power. Great support is VERY important. If you don’t want to or don’t know how to upgrade WordPress.org, you should consider this.
• Space – You may have just a couple of files or you may have lots and lots of high resolution pictures. You’ll need a place for these files to live.
• Bandwidth – Even if you have just a couple of pictures, if they get accessed 2o million times, you’ll need to make sure you have enough bandwidth to handle the transfer.

My first consideration when choosing WordPress hosting is the number of websites I am dealing with. This usually gives you an idea of the bandwidth, databases, and space you’ll be needing. If you have only one site with a few visitors , you’d be in great shape using a service like Page.ly or a basic account at HostGator. However, if you have multiple sites with numerous visitors, you’re going to need something quite a bit more substantial.

1) Support. This isn’t doesn’t just come in the form of people you call when your site starts acting funny. There are many things that go on behind the scenes you’ll want to consider. The security of WordPress depends heavily on the servers in which it resides. If the host doesn’t update to the latest versions of PHP, mySQL, or apply patches to the linux operating system, you may find that your blog becomes the new home of some Russian hacker. Finally, WordPress itself needs to be updated. It’s very important that you keep current on your updates. In recent version, WordPress has added a one-click upgrade option, but your host must support and you must be do it. If you go with a hosting company like Page.ly, they’ll update the WordPress install for you automatically in addition to the server software.

2) Price. The prices for WordPress hosting can vary from a cup of coffee to a a few nights in a 5 star hotel. What you need to decide is how critical your site is. Can you handle 10 minutes of downtime per month? How about 2 hours? How about if you fluff up an upgrade and your site is down for 6 hours before support can help you? The “Cup of Coffee” plan isn’t going to have the same great response to problems or downtime that the “5 star Hotel plan” will have. If every minute counts, don’t skimp. If you just want to post pictures of your dog, the cup of coffee plan is fine, if you want to be on the front page of Digg everyday, you’re going to need something substantially more powerful.

3) Space. WordPress needs space. It doesn’t just need space on a hard disk, or space in RAM, it also needs space in a database, and it needs ‘space’ in the processing realm. Some of the premium themes available for WordPress are gorgeous, but extremely resource intensive. They resize pictures, ping other websites and process cron jobs behind the scenes. It’s very important your hosting can keep up with all of these or your site is going to suffer in speed and reliability. Google has now publicly said that they are considering speed as a factor in ranking, so if your site is slow, you’re jeopardizing your ability to rank highly in Google, and likely, other search engines as well.

4) Bandwidth. Bandwidth is a difficult concept to explain to laymen. The best way to describe it is to think of it as the water coming to your house. That water starts somewhere else and ends up in your tub, but you have to pay to get it there. That is the essence of bandwidth. Every picture, every piece of text, every video has to to travel to you. If you have just a few visitors, you’ll probably never consider bandwidth. If you hit the front page of Digg, you could eat up your bandwidth in a single day. Make sure you buy for where you COULD be, not where you are. That said, as much as we love Fluffers the cat sitting on your keyboard, she probably won’t make the front page of Digg.

Finally, there are intangible things you’ll need to consider when choosing hosting. Let’s say you have a host with super fast support, they always pick up the phone, but they are really big jerks. Having someone belittle your for 20 minutes while they tool around in your .htaccess isn’t my idea of fun. So you’ve got to consider the people you’re working with, the services they offer, and where you’re comfortable. Switching WordPress hosts isn’t as difficult as people would like you to believe, and if you’re unhappy with where you are, you should consider a change.

If you haven’t considerd Page.ly to host your new (or existing) WordPress site consider the following:

• Page.ly is managed. Critical updates are pushed after they come out. You could be on a beach in Bermuda — no problem.
• Page.ly is FAST. Not only do they have lots of heavy iron serving your website, but making an account takes less than 2 minutes WITH a domain. You probably can’t even download WordPress in that time.
• Great support. Fanatical support. If you’re unhappy, they’re all ears.

If you are a new customer, they’ll even give you a brand new domain name to get started with. That’s pretty sweet, and for $15/month, it’s hard to go wrong with managed hosting. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing, if a critical WordPress upgrade comes out, you can be assured that it’s going to get handled. That kind of security is of intangible value if you like your site always being available.