Quotidien Libre is an online daily published by FG Éditions, of which Fabrice GIL is the founder, director and editor in chief. The site was growing, and that was precisely the problem: its shared host was throttling it, mainly through a cap on the number of queries allowed against the database. For a news site, where every article page triggers a series of queries, that cap is a wall. The provider's handling of the issue had not kept up.
The project in detail
The figures give the measure of what the site was taking. The access log of 28 November 2017, found in the archives, carries 18,736 requests over the first eleven hours of the day. That is the volume of a living press site, and it is not what an entry-level shared plan supports.
The migration was split into stages, so the impact on the business could be measured in advance and kept as short as possible. First an exact copy of the site in its new environment, then thorough testing with the client, because a migration reveals departures from coding standards and it is better to find them before switching. Then an agreed window during which the newsroom stops publishing, long enough to change the DNS records and wait for them to propagate. That step is the only constraining one, and I announced it as such with its estimated duration, rather than promising an invisible switch.
Application maintenance followed, monthly: database backups, updates of the WordPress core, the theme and the active plugins to their latest stable versions, and preventive measures when they were needed. For a daily paper the value of that contract is not technical but editorial: the newsroom stops looking after its infrastructure and concentrates on what it publishes.
The site ran on WordPress 4.9 with performance tooling consistent with its use: bundling and slimming of style and script files, image compression on upload, regular page speed measurement, a cookie consent banner and a search plugin. The recovered repository keeps the trace of the move: a diagnostic file left by the previous host was still sitting at the root, which is exactly the kind of residue a takeover has to clean out.
The relationship ran for ten consecutive months of invoicing, which is the only proof that counts for a maintenance contract.