The Road to High Availability WordPress Hosting

The road to High Availability WordPress Hosting can be short and narrow or long and winding. If your WordPress site is subject to huge surges in traffic or serves millions of requests you’ll eventually need big league hosting.

You may already be asking yourself just what does high availability WordPress mean and how does it differ from regular old, run of the mill WordPress hosting?

The answer is that high availability WordPress hosting:

• deploys multiple failovers, and other service redundancies.
• anticipates, detects, and isolates service disruptions.
• is self-healing and recovers without human intervention.
• leverages other technologies like load-balancing and machine learning that increase stability and speed.
• autoscales up and down depending on need, so you only pay for the resources you use.
• is designed to process and serve millions of requests and transactions across wide geographical locations.

Put a simpler way, High Availability WordPress Hosting is hosting that never fails, is blistering fast, and very secure. GEMServers High Availability WordPress Kubernetes system (HAWKS) is the latest Google Container Engine platform. We created HAWKS for the most demanding WordPress applications. HAWKS also powers Press Engine, our high performance WordPress as a Service offering. PressEngine is scheduled for release in early 2017!

Now that you’ve gotten a better idea of where your hopefully going (after all, if you need GEMServers, you’ve done a lot of thing right), let’s look at where most WordPress self-hosting journeys begin.

Traditional WordPress hosting

Hosting companies, even WordPress managed hosting companies, mostly follow a similar model. Figure 1, for example, shows you the common practice of a large percentage of cheap hosting outlets. They offer cheap, low performance, shared hosting behind CPANEL. They drive as many add-on services as they can pack into a screen, with hundreds options to choose from.

For this reason, traditional self hosting, for many site owners, is neither a comfortable, nor efficient process. Let’s start with the cheapest option.

You sign up, log in, and are presented with a complicated control panel. Basically, they provide the minimum required to install WordPress. Everything else is yours to deal with. And critical features like automated backups either don’t exist or cost extra. Some of these big hosting mills have adopted the term “WordPress hosting.” But, that’s just their attempt to make a silk purse from a sows ear.

The GoDaddy’s, the Bluehost’s, and the Hostgator’s all play a numbers game where you pack as many accounts as possible, into as little resources as possible. They’ve already accounted for loss and attrition connected to customers who sign up and become dissatisfied with performance. They’ll either talk them into upgrading or they’ll lose them as customers. And some of those customers will decide to move to the next tier; the one we refer to as WordPress focused hosting.

WordPress focused hosting

The reason why we don’t call these services “managed” hosting services, is because they only partially manage your site(s). They are much better alternatives to the traditional hosting mills, that much is certain. But much of managing what goes on behind the scenes is still up to the site owner. The learning curve can be steep and confusing, as can be the terminology.

If you have the time and inclination to learn the ins and outs of these services and features this may be the best choice for you. If not, it can often be just as frustrating. Hidden costs associated with these kinds of services include usage limits that can significantly increase your fees. With that said here is a common path into a WordPress focused hosting service:

You sign up, log in, and you already have a new WordPress site ready to go. WordPress and approved plugins get updated semi-automatically. You get a staging site in some cases to test changes on, and they back your site up automatically. Performance is usually better, but not always stellar. With few exceptions, and lots of crafty tech terms, that’s where “managing” your WordPress hosting account shifts from their responsibility to yours.

And that means you will have to deal with dozens of important maintenance and management tasks, including managing your domain names, SSL certificates, DNS host records, and identifying and restoring your site from backup archives yourself. It’s better hosting than the “we’ve got great WordPress hosting for 25 bucks a month or less” hosting mills, but it still isn’t great hosting.

GEMServers: Simple High Availability WordPress Hosting

GEMServers goes far beyond what other hosting companies do. Our platforms are high density, multiple region, high availability, and vault secured. Our hosting packages are setup to safely handle millions of transactions a day. But, we also created our hosting platform around one simple idea:

Our hosting services need to free our clients to focus on creating great content, grow their business, and achieve their goals.

We take care of everything else. When you need something hosting related, you simply ask your expert GEMServers site reliability engineer and they’ll take care of it quickly, correctly, and with a smile because that’s what we love to do. And we’ll be there to give you advice on your technology and website even when it’s not hosting related.

 

Confused about high availability WordPress hosting. Check out our latest post on how to choose the best WordPress hosting for your needs?