A publication's worst day and its best day are the same day. The story goes wide, the traffic arrives in minutes, and the newsroom still needs to publish the follow-up.
Two things decide whether a big day goes well: how much the edge absorbs, and how quickly a correction reaches readers.
An article that goes wide is one page requested by everybody. Served from the edge cache, that is one render and then bandwidth — the origin barely notices the difference between a thousand readers and a hundred thousand.
Publishing or editing an article purges exactly that article and the pages listing it, rather than the whole site. A correction is visible in seconds without throwing away every warm cache entry you have.
wp-admin is never cached, so it competes with front-end traffic for PHP. Worker allocation leaves headroom for the newsroom, so the next story does not wait for the last one to stop trending.
Images and video are served from the edge with range requests. A photo essay is bandwidth at the edge rather than PHP workers at the origin.
Daily backups of database and uploads, so a botched bulk edit across an archive is a restore rather than an editorial incident.
You find out a story went wide from your analytics, not from your hosting. That is the entire objective.
News traffic is the easiest kind to serve and the easiest kind to get wrong: everybody wants the same page at the same moment, which is exactly what a cache is for.
News load is spiky, anonymous and repetitive. That combination is unusually kind to a cache, provided the purge behaviour is right.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Edge cache TTL | Long for articles, short for listings | An article rarely changes after publication; the front page changes every time an editor touches it. |
| Purge scope | The article and the pages that list it | Purging the whole site on every publish throws away warm cache during the exact hour it is most valuable. |
| Admin capacity | Headroom reserved outside the front-end pool | wp-admin cannot be cached, so without reserved capacity the newsroom slows down precisely when it is busiest. |
| Media delivery | Edge-served with range requests | Photo and video-heavy articles would otherwise tie up origin workers streaming files. |
| Comment traffic | Treated as uncached writes | Comment posting is the one high-volume write on a news site and needs to bypass cache without dragging the article with it. |
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