Damn, that’s crazy. I suspect this could be mitigated somewhat if you only get popular premium plugins that are open source as well. But that is likely more expensive and limits flexibility.

Yeah, it’s definitely a solution I am currently researching. The main hurdle is to consider how to transfer everything. Let’s say I get a VPS or a cheap, but modern dedicated server with low storage. Or perhaps even wordpress managed hosting for much better security if offloading can be properly integrated, since plugin choice and functionality might be limited. Premium plugins like WP Offload Media only work when you already have the media on your local storage. A risky solution would be offloading the media on my current server, then installing the plugin on the new server and hoping all the media syncs…

So you would definitely recommend going with OLS over nginx for my context?

Thank you for the good insight! I suspect the bot problem is only going to get worse with time and the bots more complex… I will definitely need to consider this.

Given the excessive amount of RAM the new server will have wouldn’t it make sense to try and load from RAM instead of from the disk? Althought nvme gen4 ssds are blazingly fast as well. Also see the reply I wrote to @dan@upvote.au for more context I forgot to write in my initial post.

It’s 200-250k monthly users… Yeah, the server is overkill. Unfortunately, the situation is a bit more tricky, I forgot to mention the storage constraint in my initial post. Look at the reply I wrote to @dan@upvote.au to see what I mean.

Sorry for the late reply. We are using an older Hetzner with i7 6700, 64 gb and 500 GB SATA SSD. It’s quite ancient by modern standards and it is starting to show its age in some usecases. I am well aware the new machine is way too powerful for our current context but unfortunately the site is very old so it amassed a huge library of media of over 300gb over many years. If we plan to store it locally, we could probably compress it aggresively to free a few dozen GB, but to be fair it would only delay the inevitable upgrade. Clearly, an alternative would be some sort of media offloading with premium WordPress plugins to ensure robustness and regular updates, but that introduces complexity, so it’s something I will need to discuss with our developer since it could create a situation “it’s not my fault offloading caused these issues, since I initially recommended local storage for reliability”.

But let’s say we do choose this very powerful server, you mentioned loading from the disk, but wouldn’t loading from RAM (given the excessive amount of RAM for this usecase) be preferable whenever available?

Sorry for the late reply and thank you for offerint these options to me. The articles were also interesting. :)

An interesting read. I am glad I posted here. :)

True, I’ve come across some free plugins that offer better functionality than paid versions. The issue is how often will the dev update it and how long will development continue. It might be risky to depend longterm on something that is free but has 5k downloads vs something that is paid with 50k downloads and is getting constant updates. Of course, if you pirate paid plugins it’s arguably even worse with the updates… so I guess pirating plugins is not really the best of ideas.

Yeah, I am starting to come to the same conclusion. Keeping the plugin up to date seems like the biggest issue even IF I do manage to find an initial reliable source.

That seems quite legit :). Thank you! Will check it out

Some of the plugins I’ve seen use “tokens” for example to enable pro features. They also have free versions but their functionality is often severely limited.

I am not a dev myself, I am collaborating with someone who is though but I doubt he would be willing to do that and guarantee me the code is malware free.