Which hosting plan for a news site or magazine: traffic peaks, ads and a growing archive

Choosing the Right Plan··· 276 views· 3 min read

The short answer: a news site has three weights: the peaks when a story spreads, the ads, which load third-party scripts, and the archive, which only grows. At the start, a shared plan with good caching is fine; if the peaks are strong and constant, the next step is a VPS or Cloud.

What weighs, and what does not

Part of the site What to do
Peaks Nearly all requests are for the same pages, and the cache serves them without work. See LiteSpeed Cache and Cloudflare.
Ads and tracking codes Each is one more request and slows the page. See Tag Manager and pixels and Popups and banners.
Archive Thousands of articles and images take up space and a number of files. See The limits nobody advertises and Disk Usage.
Database Revisions and old data fatten it: Slimming the WordPress database.
Speed for the reader It is what Google measures. See Core Web Vitals.

How to choose, step by step

1 Start with a shared plan and caching on.
2 Put Cloudflare in front if you expect peaks: it serves pages without reaching the server.
3 Measure before adding ads, and after each one.
4 Prepare for the day of a peak: Preparing for a traffic spike.
5 Move to a VPS or Cloud when the site answers slowly even with caching, or when many readers are logged in (caching helps less).
Unreviewed AI-written texts can hurt the site, and a newsroom’s credibility lives on being trustworthy: see AI-written content and Google.
Take backups of a site that publishes every day, and test the restore: a lost day of news cannot be recovered.

Launching a news site or a magazine? Tell us how many visits you expect and whether you will have ads.

Open a support ticket

In our plans

SituationPlanWhy
Starting out: a small news site or magazinePro or PlusPro (1 site, 10 GB SSD NVMe) to try the idea; Plus (6 sites, 20 GB) if you already plan more titles or a companion site.
A growing archive, with years of articles and imagesUltra or BusinessUnlimited sites and 30 to 200 GB SSD NVMe, with unlimited databases.
Strong, constant peaks, or many readers logged inVPS or CloudResources of your own: VPS2 has 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and 80 GB NVMe, and Cloud2 has 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 50 GB NVMe.

When to move up: move up when the archive of articles and images starts to fill the disk, when the site answers slowly even with caching on, or when the peaks stop being occasional and become the normal day. Another sign is the newsletter or the alerts to readers reaching the plan’s limit of e-mails per hour (100 in Pro, 200 in Plus, 300 in Ultra). Moving up can be done at any time without losing the site. Every plan has an automatic daily backup with free restores; for a site that publishes every day, test a restore once to be sure.

SEE ALSO

LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress: the first settings

Cloudflare: when it helps, how to switch it on, and the cache that fools you

Preparing for a traffic spike: a campaign, a launch or a live event

The limits nobody advertises: inodes, processes and memory

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