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Hoping to get that set up just as soon tr.news is hardened against the massive DDOS attacks it's been hit with. We also have to be super careful about any plugins.

That makes sense. I can't even imagine. I'm using Wordfence on mine and I get tons of hits from Russia, even though I hardly have any visitors.

I would start with testing cloudflare if you haven't already - they are a kind of industry standard first defense against DDOS (unless you have a big budget).