Enlarged Image: Ish is on fire, yo. Since 2017, I’ve been helping my friend Eric Berger run the Houston weather forecast site, Space City Weather. On a regular day, SCW can see 20,000-30,000 pages for 10,000-15,000 unique visitors, but during severe weather, the traffic can exceed a million pages in 12 hours, requiring careful planning.Winter break two years ago, I moved away from the complex backend setup and switched to OpenLiteSpeed. I didn’t know much about OpenLiteSpeed, but I was attracted to its integrated caching and reputation for speed, especially for WordPress. I was also interested in making a change after running the same setup for five years.
The first challenge was that OLS is primarily managed through a GUI, bringing its own complications. However, the GUI was fast and helped identify necessary changes. Translating the existing Nginx WordPress configuration into OLS-speak was challenging, but I eventually settled on using Cloudflare to hide and secure the admin console. Another significant change was the OLS LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress, which enhances how WordPress interacts with OLS and its caching mechanisms, including the Quic.Cloud CDN service. It took time to understand and customize the plugin to optimize WordPress on OLS. Fortunately, Space City Weather provided a great testing ground for the web servers, allowing me to prepare the basics, and make the switch from Nginx to OLS.
