Thread

I am deciding which platform I’ll use for a new site which will have extremely high traffic (I know everyone thinks that, but let’s assume this to be true here).  While it won’t feel so much like a blog, blogging will be the core functionality: numerous daily posts with commenting active.

I am familiar with Wordpress and EE—not technical enough to develop the site myself, but I can get around WP okay and have had an EE site developed for me before.  My question revolves around performace.  Assuming tens of thousands of visitors per day, is EE less or more of a performance hog than WP is on a dedicated server?  I know WP can have problems and I will have to throw hardware and memory at it, but I don’t know anything about how well EE stacks up.

My other problem is that it is so darn hard to find a developer for EE; I’ve been through the EE developer search before and it’s very difficult and very expensive (even a paid request for a developer here returned not one response in the forum here); how is it these days?.

If you post a job you’ll get a response in the ee job board. I know because I respond to almost every one :D. The problem is almost nobody responds back. lol

And honestly, 10,000 visits a day isn’t that much traffic. I can say though that ee is extremely efficient, and is the choice I’ve made for a site that gets 30 million visits per month.

So if nothing else, that’s a reference for EE.

“My other problem is that it is so darn hard to find a developer for EE”

IMO, it’s still very very hard to find a top-notch, reliable EE developer. (Mine is excellent, if you can get her!) I have found this to be exasperating on the dozen or so EE related jobs I’ve sourced out over the past three years. The issue seems to be, or has been for at least a year, that DEMAND for expressionengine has seen exponential-like growth but the SUPPLY of experienced, talented developers does not seem to have quite kept pace.

My perception is that a lot of new developers are coming into the network but the experience curve varies. If you have a really advanced, large project, there is a “short list” of known experts but they are booked up so they tend to be costly and you have to sign them in advance. I just shopped a large project, and it was painful to even get an audience; a few good firms did not even respond to my RFP (and budget wasn’t the issue, they just have the flexiblity to choose their projects)

Or, you can take a chance with newbie type people/firms, they are definitely around.

David Harper

Thanks for the replies.

I would like to hear why EE is better suited to WP for high traffic sites, if it is.

Regarding the difficulty of finding EE developers that are not many, many months our or extremely expensive, is there a listing anywhere of people who do EE, but are perhaps not as “pro” as those on the pro network?

I would like to hear why EE is better suited to WP for high traffic sites, if it is.

I can’t speak to Wordpress, but as an EE developer, I can tell you that we put a great deal of thought and effort into efficiency.  There are sites with staggering traffic running EE out of the box, and we are always looking at ways we can be better.  If you want to get a sense for the type of queries we run, you can turn on display queries and see them yourself (most people don’t want or need this level of detail, but if you want to inspect things yourself, I’d encourage you to poke).

We also offer a wide, wide range of traffic management options, from the ability to disable things on a granular level, the ability to cache on a granular level, the ability to hook into things to change the way the program runs, throttling, etc, etc.

So if you’re looking for assurance that a properly setup and hosted EE can handle nearly any site configuration… the answer is a resounding yes.  If you want to discuss specific EE features, I’d be happy to do this also.

“Regarding the difficulty of finding EE developers that are not many, many months our or extremely expensive, is there a listing anywhere of people who do EE, but are perhaps not as “pro” as those on the pro network?”

Not to my knowledge. That’s the problem, IMO. I use http://www.odesk.com for technical outsourcing, a pretty popular platform. There are hundreds/thousands of wordpress developers, but about three expressionengine developers (literally, not kidding)!

But note the EE pro network has been growing pretty quickly. I just don’t think the pro network “designation” is a bright line certification per se. These firms basically, to my knowledge, have to complete a couple of sites. So, I myself do not assume that pro network inclusion is any kind of warranty; quality and service still vary. Nothing is less a commodity that web talent. David

Hi Slobizman,

We don’t do EE v. Other Product because we are not experts on Other Product. We can speak to how EE handles traffic levels. Compared to the avg. website you are right, it is a high traffic site. Compared to high traffic EE sites (that we know of), it is on the low end of the scale. Allard has already given a general overview on the subject. If there is something specific you want to know about how EE handles something, just let us know.

As to finding EE developers, it depends on what you level you need. Finding top-notch devs on any system is a difficult challenge because they tend to be in high demand, but yes, comparatively speaking there are less EE devs to go around though the number is growing rapidly. This is certainly true in EE’s case. Teams on the Pro Net have implemented at least 5 EE sites, but we do not engage in certification at this point.

Hi Slobizman,

When you say EE developers, are you after a specific EE skill like Module development or general website development using EE?

Our core business is to work with companies who design sites and outsource the website development to us.

I always find time to reply even if it’s a polite decline seeing that that person took the time to get in contact in the first place.

General website development.  Pretty basic stuff, with an article flow like a blog, with a high end design.

Hi Slobizman,

When you say EE developers, are you after a specific EE skill like Module development or general website development using EE?

Our core business is to work with companies who design sites and outsource the website development to us.

I always find time to reply even if it’s a polite decline seeing that that person took the time to get in contact in the first place.

“Regarding the difficulty of finding EE developers that are not many, many months our or extremely expensive, is there a listing anywhere of people who do EE, but are perhaps not as “pro” as those on the pro network?”

Not to my knowledge. That’s the problem, IMO. I use http://www.odesk.com for technical outsourcing, a pretty popular platform. There are hundreds/thousands of wordpress developers, but about three expressionengine developers (literally, not kidding)!

Thanks for the link. I’ll be signing up for odesk later today and then there will be 4 developers.