Cost Optimization Strategies

At Staq, we prioritize transparency and provide tools and alerts to help you manage costs effectively. While this guide will not eliminate all overage costs—particularly for resource-intensive websites—it will help identify opportunities to reduce expenses across various categories.

Cost Categories

This guide evaluates costs in the following categories:

• Visits
• Bandwidth
• Local Storage
• Database Storage
• CPU Usage
• Memory & PHP Workers

Below, you’ll find recommendations specific to each category.

Visitors

Staq tracks unique visitors at the server level. To reduce overage costs, cache your website using CDN options available in the Staq Panel for the site. Visitors served via a CDN are not counted against your visitor quota, as visitor traffic is based on server hits.

CDN Options

Staq supports the following CDN solutions:

• Staq Next-Gen CDN (requires using Staq DNS)
• Cloudflare

For guidance on enabling CDNs:

• How to implement Staq Next-Gen CDN
• How to implement and enable Cloudflare on Staq

Bandwidth

Bandwidth optimization involves several strategies:

Enable Lazyload

Lazyload prevents loading all page media until users scroll to view specific sections.

WP Rocket

• Go to WP Rocket > Media and enable:
  • Lazyload for images
  • Lazyload for CSS background images
  • Lazyload for iframes and videos

Staq Cache

Go to Staq Hosting > Optimizer > Media, then enable Lazyload images & videos.

Compress Images (Staq Hosting)

AWS Cloud Integration

Ensure Rewrite media URLs is enabled in Staq Hosting > AWS Cloud.

Optimizer Settings

In Staq Hosting > Optimizer > Media, enable:

• Rewrite media URLs
• Serve next-gen images (WebP)

Note: If you use Cloudflare, these settings do not apply. A server-based image compression feature will be available by January 2025.

Check Bandwidth Metrics

In the site’s Staq Panel > Metrics > Traffic & Storage, check:

• Amazon EC2 bandwidth
• Amazon S3 outgoing bandwidth
• Amazon CloudFront bandwidth

Evaluate whether S3 bandwidth significantly exceeds EC2 bandwidth. If yes, optimizations may be limited for images.

Compress Images – Third Party

You can use a third party image compression tool to reduce images but this will be irrelevant from January 2025 if you have Cloudflare enabled.

Compress or Offload Videos

Use tools like Veed to compress videos. Alternatively, host large videos on platforms like Vimeo or YouTube to minimize bandwidth.

Push to Cloudflare

Integrate Cloudflare to serve assets like images via CDN. This traffic does not count toward Staq bandwidth. Follow this guide: Cloudflare integration.

Local Storage

High storage usage on small websites is often due to third-party backup files. Staq backups stored on AWS S3 do not count toward storage limits. To free up space:

• Use sFTP access to check for backups, such as:
  • .zip files in the root directory
  • .wpress files in ai1wm-backups (inside wp-content)
  • updraft files in wp-content

Delete unnecessary backups or files to reduce storage costs.

Database Storage

Optimize your database using the Advanced Database Cleaner plugin. It removes expired transients, orphaned metadata, and unnecessary entries.

Check for large tables like wp_woocommerce_log and clear unnecessary entries.

CPU Usage

High CPU usage may indicate an issue, especially for non-resource-intensive websites.

Investigating Spikes

Go to Staq Panel > Metrics > PHP Workers and check data over the last 30 days. Identify spikes or consistent high usage.

Optimize Cron Jobs

Install WP Crontrol plugin inside WordPress to identify problematic cron jobs. A common offender is action_scheduler_run_queue, which runs every minute. Reduce its frequency to lower CPU usage.

Memory & PHP Workers

Memory

Check and adjust PHP memory limits:

1. Go to Staq Panel > PHP Config and review Request Memory Limit.
2. Go to Metrics > PHP Workers, select Daily > 30 days, and check if memory usage exceeded 256MB.

If not, consider downsizing the memory allocation.

PHP Workers

Similarly, under Metrics > PHP Workers, review Parallel PHP Workers. If the usage consistently stays below the limit, reduce the number of PHP workers.

By applying these strategies, you can manage and optimize costs effectively across your hosted sites.