Liberty Pundits
URL: http://libertypundits.net (inactive)
At its founding, Liberty Pundits was a joint venture by 3 established bloggers (Melissa Clouthier, Bill Dupray, and Clyde Middleton) that, in their words, was aimed at becoming the new home for conservatives on the Internet. With the three of them all being prolific bloggers, and the help of many contributors, Liberty Pundits is a bustling hub of information.
What We Did – Bill and Clyde had been part of Patriot Room, an already-recognized powerhouse, and their desire was for Liberty Pundits to contain the content that they had contributed to Patriot Room. The technical lead on that blog had moved on, so we did some divining of what was there. Once we deduced the current setup, we obtained the data from that site, determined how it would need to be manipulated to become part of a WordPress blog, then accomplished the data migration. Initially, this was deployed on the same shared hosting account where LibertyPundits.com, their podcast distribution site, already resided. The site quickly pegged and trashed the Apache server on that. They then where moved by their host to a VPS, which performed moderately better, but still had many, many issues, mostly having to do with the volume. We recommended a server configuration, including migrating from the fully-featured Apache web server to the lightweight nginx web server, and configured that server. This configuration eliminated the bottlenecks, and has enabled them to have several 100,000+ hit days with no appreciable slowdowns.
What We Still Do – DJS Consulting maintained the server, keeping it current with performance and security upgrades. We also provided support to the primary 3 bloggers, when they have questions about WordPress or how the site is performing. The site closed in August of 2011, as the primary authors moved on to other endeavors.