Determine best solution for web hosting/deployment

[november9]

Since this is essentially a WordPress site, we need to find web hosting that will be robust enough to handle high amounts of traffic in the event that the application is mentioned in any major news outlets.

Due to the fact that action guides such as the "Indivisible Guide" - which is nothing more than a PDF, as well as shared Google Spreadsheet titled "He's Your Problem Now" have gotten national media attention, I think it would be good to find some sort of scalable solution that would be able to scale, while only charging us for the bandwidth being used. Currently, the WordPress install is being hosting on one of the upper-tier plans on Bluehost, but I am not certain that this would give us what we need in the event of a major news outlet linking to us, so that needs to be determined.

[watzkej]

I've got Wordpress running on Heroku with the REST API plugin. I need to get one of the SSL plugins working to get rid of the mixed content warnings (just ignore it for now). I've got it running on the free dyno which won't scale but before we advertise this site we can simply update to the paid version which will scale.

Here's the URL if you wish to play with it: https://pure-savannah-96927.herokuapp.com/
I can give you the admin password over a PM.

[watzkej]

Tonight I'll try to convert the heroku deploy git repo to github. That should make things easier to see and for others to contribute to deployments.

[november9]

@watzkej - this is awesome! I do see those errors, but of course you're just getting things set up. There are a few plugins that need to be installed aside from the REST API ones. Happy to set those up myself, and was also hoping to be able to import a couple of XML files to set up the custom post type I'm using ("actions") as well as the custom fields that go into the "actions" post edit screens."

However, it sounds like you've got a solid approach, so I'll await further word from you before I do anything else on the Heroku stuff. Thanks!

[watzkej]

BTW, I got the github integration working. The way it works is you create a feature branch off the wcsd-backend repo I created (https://github.com/watzkej/wcsd-backend), make changes like adding a plugin directly to the wp-content directory, push to the remote branch and make a Pull Request. Heroku will recognize the PR and automatically spin up a completely separate instance of Wordpress/DB/etc with its own URL for you to test it out. When you merge the PR into master, it will respin the master at that URL above and discard the PR version of the app. It's pretty cool.