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Large Wordpress Sites, backup, and database issues

Hello,

I have a website in development. It will be a huge informational resource website, in many different languages. Right now, after our first week of development, there are 4,000 pages. This will bloom quite fast over the next couple of months. Also, all these pages are in English, and when we run an automatic translation plugin, our website will grow by at least 8 times overnight. There will probably be hundreds of thousands of pages, if not more, and this will always be growing.

Right now, my website is setup on a cPanel hosting account that has many other "Add-on domains," with other wordpress installs and databases. That is juts some general info. I am wondering, at what point should be I thinking about installing the Multi-DB plugin from WpMuDev, and what general advice do you have for me, for trying to run such a mass Wordpress site.

Any plugin recomenndations, or recommendations in general?

Thanks

  • Jack Kitterhing

    Hi there @RStudios

    I hope you are well today.

    That's a lot of content! As you mention Multi-DB I presume this is a multisite install?

    If so I would recommend installing Muti-DB any time from now, and put your content into separate directory/sub domains which ever your using and then maybe use a VIP for database for your most accessed content.
    I would recommend that you get amazing hosting if you haven't all ready.
    I'd personally have the the DB's on one server with the content on another to give maximum speed, you may also want to look at a CDN (Content Delivery Network) i.e Amazon S3 etc.

    Make sure you backup every day at least twice, you don't want to loose that data, before you upgrade always test on a replica/sandbox site that would be exactly the same as your normal install. Then you can test if a upgrade or adding a plugin is going to break your installation.

    Thanks!

    Kind Regards
    Jack.

  • Jack Kitterhing

    Hi there @RStudios

    I hope you are well today.

    1: A VIP means that a site on your multisite network would have it's own Database and not share it with other sites, below I've taken a quote directly from the usage instructions

    A note about VIP databases: These allow you to place a blog in a specific database. Unless you have a blog/site that gets a ton of traffic and you want to put it on another physical server for performance reasons, then it’s not really worth it to bother with that feature. Again, the vast majority of installs do not need to use VIP blogs, so skip over it unless you are sure you need to use this feature. Each VIP blog/site will need it’s own database which is why you’d use vip1, vip2, etc. You’ll use the add_vip_blog() function in db-config.php to move specific blogs to these databases.

    You can find the usage instructions here https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/multi-db/#usage

    2: Hmm, that's a bit tougher, personally I do it the long way, by putting my content on both manually, including plugins etc and update the sandbox site before the main site to check all content and functions work correctly. I know others that export and import their content into and from WordPress, but personally I've found this can cause issue so I never recommend this way, but that's not too say you shouldn't try doing if you want.
    Make sure they all have the same settings, DNS, server configurations etc, make your sandbox site a entirely separate domain to your main site, rather than a sub domain or sub directory install so to avoid issues with domain configurations etc.

    Data organization in the admin side, you'll want to make sure everything is in category's, tagged etc, so you can easily search for something if you need it.

    To find out about creating a multisite network, take a look at this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

    Also due to the larges amount of content and spreading it across a multisite, I would recommend that you don't choose the post name permalink, and also to put the language in the title of the post.

    I hope this helps! :slight_smile:

    Kind Regards
    Jack.

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