Movable Type: once great, now only good UX, HORRIFIC scalability problems when dealing with low traffic but a lot of content. WordPress: crap UX, but incredibly scalable, maintainable, and extensible.

This blog, with 8300+ posts, 15k+ comments, brought MovableType to its knees. Scratch that, Movable Type brought any server hosting this blog to its knees. We’re not talking high-traffic here. A single search from a single user would CRAWL and cause an absurd spike in server CPU usage. Throw in a few spam bots doing a few more searches (nothing exactly dramatic, mind you) and each host we tried would crumble and knock this account offline.

This was the case regardless of dynamic or static publishing. As I said, Search was the largest culprit here. Optimizing the database, rebuilding things, fresh install, nothing helped. MT 4.0 and 4.1, same exact thing. Again: FRESH installs, no plugins, as vanilla as you can get.

So we were looking at spending 5 times as much a month moving to a VPS solution (which I still have my doubts would’ve changed anything) or finally giving WordPress a go.

We’ve been WordPress for over a month now and I so very much wish I’d switched things sooner. Same content, same cheap $10/month shared host, but zero issues.