Sunday, January 4, 2009, 3:04pm
Crooks and Liars originally started out on Radio Userland , which served as its home for two years. After that we started exploring other blogging platforms. At that time we were averaging around 100,000 hits per day. We decided to move to Wordpress , which could handle our smaller team of only 4 at the time.
As the site continued to grow and we were approaching the 200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for Wordpress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for Wordpress to handle the replication.
While investigating the problems we realized one of our problems was the high level of comments the site receives per day -- around 2,000. Being a political blog we also attract a lot of disruptions in our comments, which meant a larger work load for our small moderation team of volunteers.