An open-source project site is quiet for months and then takes a year of traffic in an afternoon, usually because somebody else posted the link.
Docs, downloads and a traffic pattern that is entirely out of your hands.
Traffic is flat until the project is on the front page of somewhere, and that is not on anyone's calendar. Scaling is automatic rather than something you request while it is happening.
Artefacts are the bandwidth on these sites, and serving them through PHP is how a launch takes the site down at the moment most people are looking at it.
Documentation changes on release days and almost never in between, which is close to the ideal caching profile — long lifetimes with a deliberate purge.
Links to old releases live in issue threads and other people's blog posts indefinitely. Breaking them breaks documentation you do not control.
Comment widgets and issue trackers load after the page renders, so a third-party service having a bad day does not slow a page about to meet ten thousand people.
For a project site the only interesting hour of the quarter is the one after a release goes out. Everything else is background.
Almost all of that traffic wants the same three pages and one file. Handled properly it is the most cacheable surge there is.
These differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan, and each follows from traffic you do not control arriving without warning.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Scaling trigger | Automatic, with no approval step | A front-page spike is over before a support ticket about it would be read, so reacting manually is not a strategy. |
| Release artefacts | Edge-served with byte-range and resume support | Binaries are the bandwidth on a project site, and pushing them through PHP is how a launch takes down the page announcing it. |
| Documentation pages | Long cache lifetimes with a deliberate purge on release | Docs change on release days and almost never otherwise, which is the easiest caching profile any site can have. |
| Version archive | Kept at permanent URLs indefinitely | Old release links live in issue threads and other people's writing forever, and breaking them breaks documentation you have no way to update. |
| Third-party embeds | Loaded after first paint | Comment and issue widgets should not be able to delay a page that is about to be read by ten thousand people at once. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, scaling with no approval step, and release files served from the edge.