Hosting and operations for xakep.ru, an information-security publication. Millions of views a day on WordPress, seven years without a rewrite for load.
Client
Xakep, xakep.ru, Russia
Years
2013 — 2020
Scope
Hosting, performance, security
Stack
WordPress
The problem
Xakep had been in print since 1999, and in the 2010s it moved the business onto the web: subscription access instead of a print run. From that point the site stopped being a shop window for the magazine and became the magazine — along with the revenue, the subscribers and the reputation.
The load is millions of views a day; the stack is WordPress, a system that does not withstand that out of the box. And the readers are information-security professionals: a publication about vulnerabilities can less afford than anyone to be down or to leak.
What we did
We took on everything underneath the application and were answerable for the whole result: availability, response time and the security of the platform.
Result
Millions of views a daySeven years running, on WordPress, with sub-second responses where it matters to the reader. The publication survived leaving print and is still on the same engine today — the site never had to be rewritten for load.
Hosting as a service
A separate service grew out of this work. We take on high-load applications regardless of stack: we do not rewrite somebody else’s code, we make sure it holds the load and responds quickly where the user notices.
This is the case where “still working years later” is not a figure of speech but a contractual term.
