ergophobe - 3:24 am on Mar 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

The only way to really judge is to compare traffic with the # of servers ... wordpress has tons of database calls that could probably cleaned up.

Yes, of course Wordpress.com isn't serving all that up off a single shared server, and so that's where the question of caching, DB calls, load and all that comes in. But again, how much time will Webwork spend building out a custom solution that is super fast, but instead of launching tomorrow, he launches in 2009?

Jeff - build your damn site in whatever is easiest to implement (I say that as a fellow-traveller who is easily paralyzed by overanalysis). It's just data. That's the beauty of something that is dynamic instead of using static pages. I just transfered a site with a few hundred pages from something else to WP and it wouldn't be that hard to transfer it again to a custom solution if WP was taxing the server.

might be a bad idea because of the fact that then if you change the look of the wordpress part of the site you'll have to change the look of the flat files, etc.

The first site I managed was a hybrid static/dynamic and it was absolutely a nightmare to maintain. This was before Wordpress or Drupal and it was this maintenance nightmare that prompted me to dust off my old programming skills. I swore that I would never again do anything with a website that required me to edit every page just to change the look of the site. Separation of content and presentation is absolutely essential to your sanity IMO. I know people manage sites with a few dozen pages using Dreamweaver and such, but when you're talking thousands of pages... UGH!

If you want to keep server cost absolutely minimal, you can eschew WP for this and go with the old standby

<?php include('header.php') ; ?>
<?php include('sidebar.php'); ?>
<div id="content">blah blah blah </div>
<?php include('footer.php'); ?>

There are better ways to do it, but at the minimum, a simple system like that will let you make site-wide changes with no DB calls at all and efficiency very close to flat-file.