Black Friday traffic killed my $3/mo plan

Customer on Contabo's €3/mo "starter" plan. 200 concurrent carts. Magento.

The ticket said, and I quote: "I will be contacting my lawyer if you do not upgrade my server for free because this is false advertising you said unlimited"

We did not say unlimited. We said "unmetered bandwidth" which is different. Which is worse. Which is why I drink.

Thread purpose: share your ecommerce war stories. Specifically: what actually worked under sudden load. Configs, providers, lies you told clients. Go.

Ok so I had same thing on a €4 plan from Hetzner magento is a monster it was eating 2GB ram per php process I just enabled opcache and prayed worked until it didn't Run-on paragraph incoming: the real fix was switching to litespeed but thats another $8/mo and the client didnt want to pay so we stayed on apache and I told them it was "cloud optimized" which meant I added a cdn and crossed my fingers Still lost the client to Vultr in january their $12 plan whatever — https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

I run a small Magento store on Windows Server 2019 with IIS and PHP 8.1. Handled 150 concurrent users last Black Friday without issue. The key was Redis for sessions and proper application pool tuning. Most Linux admins dismiss Windows for PHP workloads, but the thread pool model handles burst traffic more predictably than prefork Apache. Not saying it's better. Saying it's viable. To be fair.

The real fix is nginx microcache I tyried everything else and microcache saved my shop on RackNerd $5 plan 2000 concurent users no joke you figure it out

Here is config I use no warranty runs good tho

fastcgi_cache_path /var/cache/nginx levels=1:2 keys_zone=MICRO:10m inactive=10m;
fastcgi_cache_key "$scheme$request_method$host$request_uri";
fastcgi_cache_valid 200 10s;

The secret is 10 seconds my friend 10 seconds cart pages cache 10 seconds product pages 10 seconds everything then purge on order woocommerce doesnt even notice you figure it out I refuse to edit this post ever

10 seconds on cart pages? That would break stock accuracy.