The client, Psyked, needed a multi purpose website with several custom features. Ecommerce, hosting large quantities of photos, blog posts and scope for custom designed elements down the road.
After establishing budget (which was low), I started assessing which platforms would be best for the project. Initially the client wanted to go with Shopify, but with the varying requirements and future custom work, it would be not only be prohibitively expensive, but impossible in some cases. Since the site would be content heavy (photos, media), it made sense to have ecommerce as an addon – rather than having content as an addon with Shopify.
WordPress with Elementor & WooCommerce was chosen for it’s flexibility, low cost and ease of use.
The site was then designed, populated with content and hosted on my own local cluster of servers. The stack was deployed on Kubernetes, with horizontal pod autoscaling and plenty of load balancing. HAproxy built with WolfSSL provides 0RTT and HTTP/3 over QUIC for lighting fast connection time, which coupled with fastcgi caching, yields excellent response times.
To check the stack was purring, it was load tested with Locust.io – where it autoscaled to effortlessly handle 2000 users without even breaking a sweat.
