My company a large number of small Wordpress sites. Currently we have about 10, but that number will eventually grow into the range of 50-70. We currently have a Linode for all of our sites, but it is starting to get unwieldy installing Wordpress and configuring it for every new site.Anyone have any recommendations for hosting lots and lots of Wordpress sites in as simple a way as possible? Preferably we'd like the performance of a Linode with the ease of a shared host with a one-click install.
How can I host a large number of Wordpress sites that perform well and are easy to maintain?
web hosting;wordpress
Assuming that all of your WordPress sites are running under a single Linode VPS (it would definitely not make sense to put each site on its own VPS if you are concerned with ease of maintenance and performance) here are a handful of recommendations:Install and configure Alternative PHP Cache (conveniently available with aptitude or yum)Activate WordPress Multisite instead of creating separate WordPress installationsInstall and configure W3 Total Cache for all installationsRefer to the Apache Performance Tuning document as a basis for tuning your VPS (MySQL tuning is useful but less important if you are using W3 Total Cache)There are additional operating system-level optimizations which you may want to examine (particularly noatime to reduce disk I/O for files in your web root - disk I/O is a very common VPS bottleneck after CPU time) but it will ultimately probably be cheaper to switch to a dedicated hosting environment rather than try to squeeze additional performance out of a VPS once you get to the point at which additional optimizations would make a big difference - the fact that you are sharing resources with your VPS neighbors is likely to have a greater impact on performance.