What is a news and media website and how do I handle high traffic?
News websites experience extreme traffic spikes — a viral article can drive 100x normal traffic within minutes. Architecture for handling spikes: 1) Full-page caching: LiteSpeed Cache on Connect Quest LiteSpeed hosting serves cached HTML without PHP/MySQL. A single server handles 10,000+ concurrent readers of cached articles. 2) CDN (Cloudflare): static assets (images, CSS, JS) served from edge, reducing origin load by 80%. 3) Database optimization: news sites have heavy read traffic. Enable Redis object cache and optimize wp-posts index on post_date and post_status. 4) Lazy loading: images below the fold load on scroll, reducing initial page weight. 5) Video: embed YouTube/Vimeo rather than self-hosting video. Recommended Connect Quest stack for news: VPS 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM + LiteSpeed + Cloudflare Free + Redis. This handles 100,000+ daily pageviews reliably. For breaking news surge protection: enable Cloudflare "I'm Under Attack Mode" to challenge suspicious traffic while passing real readers. Set up at connectquest.co.in.