Cost & Operation Optimization Tips for Event Platforms

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Practical strategies from “Will It Be Sunny Tomorrow?”, a regional event & community platform built with WordPress and AI.

Managing API costs, reducing server load, and maintaining stable performance are essential for any event platform—especially for small teams or individual creators. This guide summarizes practical cost-saving strategies, API optimization methods, and scalable system design used in the operation of the regional event platform Will It Be Sunny Tomorrow? (event.r2fish.com).

Although the site runs on a single ConoHa WING shared server, this is a strategic choice to balance performance, cost, and long-term maintainability. During the design phase, a multi-server configuration with an Nginx VPS front layer was considered, but the current architecture provides the best cost-performance ratio at this stage.

1. Why Cost Optimization Matters for Event Platforms

Event platforms often depend on external APIs such as Google Search, Google Places, OCR, and AI review pipelines. These services are powerful, but:

• API usage scales unpredictably
• Costs increase as the site grows
• Server load becomes unstable during peak hours
• Inefficient requests degrade performance

Cost management is therefore both a financial and scalability strategy.

2. Current System Architecture (ConoHa WING + AI Modules)

Will It Be Sunny Tomorrow? operates on:

• WordPress (SWELL child theme)
• ConoHa WING shared hosting
• Custom modules for forms, OCR autofill, facility generation, taxonomy, AI reviews, and link crawling
• AI pipelines for classification, validation, scoring, and summarization

This architecture prioritizes simplicity, predictable cost, easy maintenance, and stable performance for regional-scale traffic.

3. Google API Cost Management Strategies

3-1. Reduce Places API Consumption

• Cache place results per region
• Avoid repeated detail lookups
• Validate URLs before calling the API
• Request minimal fields instead of full payloads

These optimizations significantly reduced API usage without lowering data quality.

3-2. Control Search API Requests

• Generate structured search queries (AI-assisted)
• Batch requests by region
• Avoid processing low-density areas unnecessarily
• Stop querying once sufficient valid URLs are found

The goal is to gather enough reliable data, not everything.

3-3. Cache All Verified URLs

Every validated URL is stored and reused for future crawls, improving speed and reducing unnecessary API calls.

4. AI Review Pipeline: Balancing Cost and Accuracy

The AI review pipeline is used for classification, region detection, URL validation, facility scoring, and more. To optimize performance:

• Use lightweight models for simple tasks
• Reserve advanced models for ambiguous or complex inputs
• Reuse previously generated outputs
• Avoid duplicate sibling URLs within the same region

This hybrid method keeps accuracy high while significantly reducing token cost.

5. Server Load Reduction Techniques

• Cache regional link JSON files
• Avoid heavy synchronous operations during front-end rendering
• Offload AI tasks to worker modules
• Lazy-load images and hero visuals
• Optimize user uploads using WebP conversion

The platform minimizes PHP load and maintains stable performance even under shared hosting.

6. Scaling Strategy for Future Growth

System growth is planned in stages while maintaining current stability:

• Phase 1 — Keep ConoHa WING as the core (current setup)
• Phase 2 — Add a VPS as a reverse proxy with Nginx
• Phase 3 — Move AI pipelines to dedicated workers

This roadmap preserves flexibility without requiring major redesign.

7. Summary: Sustainable Operation Through Smart Architecture

Cost optimization ensures that an event platform remains stable, predictable, and scalable, even when operated by a single creator.

• Use APIs intentionally
• Cache aggressively
• Separate heavy tasks from front-end rendering
• Select infrastructure based on cost-performance
• Keep architecture simple until scale requires expansion

Will It Be Sunny Tomorrow? continues to evolve with this philosophy at its core.

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• Cost & Operation Optimization Tips for Event Platforms