Scaling WordPress For Fun and For Profit

Having grown WP Engine to host over 120,000 web sites in only a few years has led to many lessons learned about how to scale applications, and in particular how to scale WordPress. Many of these lessons are applicable to other businesses. In this presentation we’ll cover some key learnings around how you learn the strengths and weaknesses of an open source project and how you can work around those or leverage those to your advantage. We’ll focus on some key technologies you can use to stretch open source software in ways you never would have thought possible. We’ll also talk about ways to measure your business and how you use this data to grow in the right directions, and how to know when you’re growing the wrong way. We’ll talk about the right and wrong tools to use for measuring and monitoring your application. Finally, we’ll talk about how you can successfully scale a product across a thousand or more servers and ways to make it cost effective. We’ll give practical examples of the right technologies and when to deploy them in your environment. All in all this presentation will cover some business elements but the focus is clearly on the technology needed to take an open source project like WordPress and build a scalable platform and business around it.