This is the best summary I could come up with:

But when severe weather events happen—especially in the summer, when hurricanes lurk in the Gulf of Mexico—the site’s traffic can spike to more than a million page views in 12 hours.

So during some winter downtime two years ago, I took the opportunity to jettison some complexity and reduce the hosting stack down to a single monolithic web server application: OpenLiteSpeed.

OLS seemed to get a lot of praise for its integrated caching, especially when WordPress was involved; it was purported to be quite quick compared to Nginx; and, frankly, after five-ish years of admining the same stack, I was interested in changing things up.

The first significant adjustment to deal with was that OLS is primarily configured through an actual GUI, with all the annoying potential issues that brings with it (another port to secure, another password to manage, another public point of entry into the backend, more PHP resources dedicated just to the admin interface).

Translating the existing Nginx WordPress configuration into OLS-speak was a good acclimation exercise, and I eventually settled on Cloudflare tunnels as an acceptable method for keeping the admin console hidden away and notionally secure.

Fortunately, Space City Weather provides a great testing ground for web servers, being a nicely active site with a very cache-friendly workload, and so I hammered out a starting configuration with which I was reasonably happy and, while speaking the ancient holy words of ritual, flipped the cutover switch.

The original article contains 589 words, the summary contains 239 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!