You can save yourself the money and just ask on the forum as there are very knowledgeable people here, or you can pm me. I haven't worked with Wordpress extensively, but know enough to answer a few questions
1. Assuming thats a realistic number, you're definitely looking at a dedicated with atleast dualcore 2ghz + 4 gigs of ram. At 500k/month you should also be looking at litespeed/nginx/cherokee or another web server technology to replace Apache. Expect pricing to be between $140 and $350.
Also, an alternative would be cloud based hosting so you can easily scale up and down during peak times (like before something popular is posted that could go viral.) That's more expensive, but you get alot of flexibility.
2. If you need a forum for users to interact, I would
only recommend third party systems. A mod is nice, but that's strictly what it is. A mod. At 500k/month you would need vBulletin/SMF . Much more developed than a mod, better security and better in every way. You could pay for an integration (if they sign up on either, it'll create an account on the other platform.) The internal message system could just be PMs on the forum. The workspace I'm not too sure what you mean by that, but if you can elaborate on that I can help more.
3.
Yes! A very small 30 kilobyte file which could be a single javascript would cost 15 gigs of transfer in a month. If you scale up to a background image, that's atleast 50 gigs. A CDN is practically required for anything over 200k uniques.
4. Don't know about that one
5. That could coded fairly easily. I don't know wordpresses specific modification hooks so I can't give a quote on making it, but the actual functionality is very basic and should cost less than $150.
6.
- Use a CDN for static content (javascript, images, sprites, videos.) Also use external CDNs so the user would more than likely already have it cached. Google has a CDN for jquery and other jscript libraries and alot of websites use it, so the person would likely not have to download the ~80kb file again. Also try to use CDNs offered by script makers. That's less of a cost for you.
- Next, make sure gzip is enabled. It will compress the output of the site so it loads faster and uses less bandwith. Its not supported in all browsers (think 9 year old browsers) so if you're targetting the young crowd you'll be fine.
- Make site element images into a sprite. So if your site uses graphic buttons and has for instance a left, middle and right... Use one image! Space it out by 1 px and then use margin/padding/width/height. That will make 3 requests turn into 1. If you have alot more elements, then you can potentially save hundreds of requests per person! That could also translate into gigabytes worth of saved overhead transfer.
- Combine on-site javascript! This is similar to the both, it will cut down on requests. Browsers are limited to ~5 active requests per domain and if you have 20 javascript files needing to be loaded that is alot of time waiting. Chunk it up!
- Put javascript at the bottom of the site. Pages load from top-down, so if you put 200kB worth of javascript at the top, it will have to download all of that before continuing to the load the page. Could easily save half a second by putting it near the bottom.
- Use AJAX where it might save on entire page reloads. Examples of this would be if stats are updated alot (~10 seconds or less) then use AJAX. It would save an entire page reload which isn't much but still better than.
- If a file cannot go on a CDN, but is still semi-static and you can choose where it goes, create subdomains. As mentioned above, browsers are limited to ~5 requests per domain. A subdomain acts like a new domain so you could use a subdomain to get 5 more.
- Monitor the site for slow mysql queries and when possible rewrite them to be faster.
- Actually remove code you don't need. This could easily increase server load.
- Use as little .htaccess directives as possible. Lots of speed is sacrificed on this.
- Do not skimp on a host. Recently I did try to steer someone away from hostwinds for their forum since hostwinds doesn't seem like a professional company for critical sites... The person went with hostwinds, and their site was down for days without response from support. Saving $20 could mean losing thousands.
- Do not skimp on coders either! The difference between a "I can do this for $10 coder" and a "I can do this for $200 coder" is the knowledge. The $10 likely doesn't speak English very well, and has to use google to even know where to start. Also probably doesn't include support or bug fixes. The $200 coder would fit your needs more often than not.
- Although not directly performance on speeds or such, but do use GA funnels and A/B testing to try to increase conversions.
- Tweak your web server and PHP settings and monitor the changes. Sometimes a simple change of memory from 128m to 156m would have massive differences!
- Also not directly performance related, but consider using an external mailing service. For newsletters I would go with mailchimp. Newsletters would be defined as everyone on the list receives the exact same thing. For general mailing from an application (sign up, new pm notices etc) then I would also go with Amazons SES. Maintaining your own mailer absolute hell and even though its more money you will save alot of time.
7. That would have to be done by a coder.
If you have any other questions or concerns, let me know.
