[PuffinBlue]

From the outside it looks like your running a fairly intensive Wordpress install on an Apache webserver with no page caching.

Also seems there's no minification or combining of stylesheets/js and there are query strings on those static assets which is going to discourage caching.

No wonder you need a datacenter to handle that kind of resource punishment!

There are plenty of reasons to stick with Wordpress in a decent sized corporation but if not switching to a static site at least stick W3TC on there so you're minimising your server load and serving out static html and minified/combined resources.

You could then consider using Varnish in front of Apache or maybe nginx with a FastCGI cache.

I"m sure you've got some folks in the team who could whip up a W3TC install in 10 minutes.

[atYevP]

Our web sys admin heard me read that out loud and now we have to get him an ice-pack because he almost shoved his head entirely through his desk.

[PuffinBlue]

Is that meant as a rude retort?

Because if it is it from the team that currently can't keep a blog post online when you get a few thousand concurrent visitors, so you might keep yourself open to suggestions and perhaps undertake the BASIC best practices of keeping a Wordpress site up under load.

If nothing else it shows a basic lack of planning for what you know to be a massively popular post, so turn a little of that judgement back on yourselves.

It's possible easily handle tens of millions of hits a day on a tiny VPS if you do even some basics right[1] and that was without any particularly extensive optimisation.

[1] http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2014/06/25/40-million-hits-a-da...

EDIT: I may not be allowed to reply to the comment below due to HackerNews restrictions so incase the option doesn't become available in the next while I'll just say I accept the answer below gracefully, withdraw my daggers and take a calming beer at the end of a long day :-)

I'm wish you continued success and look forward to the next post.

[atYevP]

No, he was agreeing. We have a lot of projects on our map to shore up some of these types of issues, but our admins are in high demand, so some of the lower-priority tasks slip on occasion. Since we rarely have issues with the blog (today was an exception) it tends to be a "we know what we'd like to change, but we'll do it when we have time" type of silo on our website.

*Edit -> to your above edit -> I think if you expand the comment by hitting the "time submitted" link you can leave a reply, thus subverting HN :P

[PuffinBlue]

Huh, it works! :-)

[atYevP]

#SubvertingTheInternetsSince1998 :D