Richard Bevan, our Technical Director and Senior Systems Administrator, explains.
If you are considering the cloud for your WordPress site, you are probably looking at security, scalability and reducing costs. The problem is that ‘cloud’ means different things to different people. For your scenario, it could mean Linux, MySQL, Apache and PHP (LAMP), which is why your DevOps are asked to help out.
Whilst your DevOps are very capable, they might not be familiar with the details. After all, the IT and cloud ecosystem is huge, and hard for anyone to fully master.
An analogy is to think about your DevOps as you would a General Practitioner. Your GP has a very broad knowledge to understand and diagnose all manner of ailments, but not only are they very busy, there are times that they will need to refer you to a specialist.
Hosting a site can be hugely time consuming when it falls outside of normal operations.
It can involve weekly or even daily maintenance, in addition to the initial investment of time and effort required for DevOps to learn a new environment.
An unmaintained website can run into a number of problems, from increasingly sophisticated hacks and threats, or from the growing size of your database, file system and traffic.
Complex cloud ecosystem
Hosting the corporate WordPress website is often very different from the hosting of company software/SASS, often requiring different web-server configurations or PHP modules, versions of PHP and maybe even a different operating system.
Other considerations might be firewalls, back-ups, load balancing, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) setup, spikes in traffic and management of vulnerability. If these elements are not taken care of to a professional level, this could potentially damage your business’s reputation.
The main challenge when hosting a WordPress website is building an environment that is suitable.
Unless you are lucky and this environment is the same as your core software/SASS, you often end up with a set-up, which is alien to all your System Admins.
Your DevOps, being aware of the complexities outlined above, may chose to outsource the hosting, but are they outsourcing to the right people? Many companies will offer to host WordPress websites, but in reality their hosting is generic and their systems are not optimised for WP.
We can help by simply removing the need for DevOps to have to deal with a complex and specialised ecosystem.
More and more of our Technology customers are handing the hosting of their websites back to us, to save them time, money and headaches.
WHAT WE RECOMMEND:
We suggest your DevOps team have a good look at these suggestions for hosting a WP site http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress
Consider using a 3rd party WAF (Web Application Firewall) to help reduce the exposure to attacks.