Question: I'm reaching a point where my clients are demanding robust hosting, but I have little experience of what to offer. I've always dealt with shared hosts like Hostgator, but now that I'm building more service-based sites and mission-critical sites like ecommerce sites, I'm realising that shared just doesn't cut the mustard.

Moreoever, I'm developing a website for selling library music online, so I need to know what my options are / should be for hosting on a solid platform.

I've read the information here:

<http://codex.wordpress.org/High_Traffic_Tips_For_WordPress>

And I'll try WP Super Cache on my music site (which is currently on Hostgator's shared hosting) and I believe the speed of my MySQL queries are probably going to be the real strain on the server and affect speed for anyone searching for music. So my question is what I'd need for sites where the traffic could potentially hit around 5-10,000 hits per day (I know that might seem high, I'm just trying to get an idea). 

From what I've seen, VPSs and dedicated servers are a lot of work to maintain (for this music site, I have limited resources) so I'm thinking cloud-based scaleable hosting might be the way?

If anyone can suggest how I might prepare for high-traffic scenarios in the most economical way, I'd be highly appreciative.

Many thanks

Osu

Answer: 
I highly recommend Amazon AWS. You can continue to use WP Super Cache with Amazon S3 (for storage of your static files such as images etc). 

For high traffic scenarios, you can set up auto scaling rules of EC2 server instances to set up new servers as needed (and cut them when not needed). 

This is the best tute I've found on installing WP on EC2:
<http://iampuneet.com/wordpress-amazon-ec2/>
Implement a multi-level caching strategy with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, & MySQL processes under optimization. At the CMS level install a plugin like WP Smush It or EWWW Image Optimizer for better image compression. For CSS/JavaScript compression & WordPress HTML page caching, install one or more of these plugins:

* **WordPress Caching Plugins:** WP Rocket , W3 Total Cache, WP Super Minify, Autoptimize, Better WordPress Minify, Breeze, WP Fastest Cache, & Fast Velocity Minify

At the web server level, implement Memcached, Opcache, & APC caching strategies for PHP & MySQL functions. Consider NGINX, Redis, & Varnish Cache solutions for the best web server performance hosting WordPress websites.