WordPress is the most widely used website CMS in the world. To ensure that a WordPress-based website provides a great experience for both the operator and visitors, especially when handling a high volume of users, the question of hosting inevitably arises.
In many cases, WordPress is set up via a 1-click application in the customer portal of a budget host, deployed on unspecified web space. The user simply waits a moment, then logs into the backend to configure and edit their website.
Such a scenario is rather uncommon in a corporate environment. Business clients want to know exactly what they are purchasing and its true value. Therefore, companies often turn to agencies and specialists capable of setting up and managing custom configurations.
Hosting Types and Performance
The speed of a website—specifically the load times when accessing pages and performing various clicks—depends not only on the underlying hardware performance (RAM, CPU, storage). Techniques such as caching, data compression, and minification, for example, have a significant impact on load times, resource usage, and consequently, the number of concurrent users the website can support. Since these techniques are largely independent of the hosting infrastructure, we will only compare hosting types here.
Shared WordPress Hosting
Traditionally, shared hosting consists of just a single web server (often an old-school Apache setup) hosting as many websites as possible. These websites share resources. While it is possible to set a maximum RAM usage limit, there is no guarantee that this RAM will actually be available—the other websites are equal partners, and all compete for the resources they need and are allowed to use.
Such platforms are not really suitable for demanding setups with a high volume of visitors or users.
Dedicated WordPress Hosting
For more demanding WordPress websites, you can use a dedicated virtual machine (VM) that is not shared with any other websites. This ensures that resources are truly dedicated to the WordPress instance. Accordingly, a high-performance VM is the ideal solution for scenarios where handling a large number of HTTP requests is critical.
Availability
Availability is not just a marketing metric. With a professional infrastructure housed in a certified data center and proven measures to prevent downtime—such as redundancy in network connections, servers, and RAID systems—availability can be reliably guaranteed. Furthermore, in such cases, Service Level Agreements are typically established to manage unforeseen incidents.
All Services on a Single VM
Running the web server, database, and files all on a single (virtual) server generally results in a high-performance setup. However, if the underlying hardware fails, everything goes down. A backup must then be restored on a new server (and the IP address may need to be rerouted to the new one).
Web, Database, and Files on Separate Servers
To prevent a physical hardware failure from taking down all services (web server, database server, and files) and causing a total outage, the services can be operated separately.
You can store files on a NAS hosted on separate hardware. If the VM fails, a new one can be provisioned without having to copy the files first; the data partition is simply mounted (e.g., via NFS). The same approach can be applied to the database server.
This gives us three servers for our WordPress application. While this sounds good initially, it is not ideal because a single server failure is not mitigated. If the database or the data partition goes down, the WordPress website goes offline. Therefore, it is essential to ensure redundancy for each individual component.
Multi-Server WordPress Hosting by SaaS Web
Multi-Server Setup Explained
Parallel Web Servers
The web server is operated redundantly: two or more servers (running Nginx) operate in parallel. They all access the same NFS data partition.
Cloud NAS
The Cloud NAS is a redundant NFS server system that shares a disk pool (RAID), allowing a single NFS server failure to be seamlessly handled.
Galera Cluster
The database servers are clustered as a Galera Cluster (minimum of 3 servers). Even if two servers fail, the application remains fully operational. The cluster is integrated into the WordPress installation as a reverse proxy (localhost), so WordPress does not have to decide which server to use for the database connection.
Master/Slave Load Balancer
To operate the web servers in parallel, the setup requires a load balancer to distribute incoming HTTP requests to the web servers. To handle a load balancer failure, it is also paired with a twin.
Failover IP
With the failover IP, the public IP (which matches the website domain) can dynamically switch between the load balancers. This happens automatically: if the slave load balancer detects that the master has failed, it requests the IP assignment.
Click here to explore the SaaS Web Managed WordPress Hosting plans.
WordPress Management with WP Steve
Regardless of the hosting environment, managing the WordPress instance is crucial. WordPress should always be up to date, along with the theme and installed plugins. For this purpose, SaaS Web has developed a WordPress management application that allows all hosted websites to be managed centrally. By default, a backup of the WordPress installation is performed once a day and before every update process.
Are you looking for a home for your website? With us, it runs on managed hosting—complete with updates, backups, and monitoring. To the Hosting Offers
