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Arstechnica runs on WordPress on AWS, and they have a really nice series of articles about it. Sure, you could use just one EC2 instance for everything, but on a high traffic website you would need a bit more.
But how many sites really are high traffic?
That's the thing with almost all of the cloud stuff: reasonable at scale, but overcomplicated garbage for 95% of the users.
95%? More like 99.999%, considering how many Wordpress sites are there.
And in many of these 0.001% cases, simple horizontal scaling would do the trick.
And if you need more than that, just use something that can work on the edge.
There's a big chunk of sites that have WP running but are mostly just static content, confusingly. If you update the content once a month and disable all comments, maybe another tool could fit better there. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I thought the same thing and tried to do a static site generator for a while, but I just liked the WordPress UI too much for composing and editing vs manually placing my images in an assets folder and remembering the file names to add them in my markdown.
Besides, with a good caching solution, isn't WordPress effectively a static site with extra steps for many use cases?
I've definitely used WP in that manner as well. At that time there were plugins that would render the pages out to static HTML in object storage. I'm sure there still are, but possibly not the same ones I used.
I just prefer not to use or manage WP whenever possible.