Using a WordPress Cluster for Hosting Your Website
Imagine if one day you want to build a huge WordPress site such as e-commerce, or a huge social media, or a streaming platform. Your website will run multiple processing jobs or services each time. These kinds of batch processing jobs that max out the CPU and disk are the huge enemy of real-time transactions.
Web visitors need a fast response from your site, so if you are maxing out your CPU and disk on the same server hosting your web traffic then your users are regularly going to encounter slowness. This can cause significant loss of interest from your visitors, loss of sales, and loss of SEO rank, and lost of reliability or trusts.
One of the best ways to avoid this slowness is by clustering the tasks. This means each of the processing jobs is simply shared with multiple servers. It is like adding RAM to your computer, so it will run faster, but this is for your sites. This method or model usually called clustered hosting.
The picture above shows a cluster that contains many servers that contain different services. The load balancer also known as server pools or server farms, it acts as the “traffic cop” standing in front of your servers and directing user requests across all servers capable of fulfilling those requests in a way that maximizes speed and capacity utilization and ensures that not a single server is overworked, which could degrade performance.
If one of the available servers goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining online servers automatically. When a new server is added to the server group, the load balancer automatically starts to send requests to it.
A load balancer can be said as the director of the servers.
This clustering hosting solution or model will decrease the chances of one service (e.g., FTP or email) affecting other services (e.g., MYSQL or messengers). This also means better hardware utilization and better security since all your eggs will not be in one basket hosting. In conclusion, a cluster is used for 4 main reasons- increased performance, increased reliability, better security, and better hardware utilization.
Why the use of cluster is very recommended?
Here are few reasons why you should consider using a cluster for your WordPress websites.
Increased performance
This seems simple, but you can imagine it like this, you are accessing a website, a good one, well-designed. In the middle of your experience, the website is frozen when you want to check for something. What you will gonna do? You will be trying to close the page.
Maybe you will never come back. First bad impression, bad sites equal to bad services you might think. On the contrary, if you experienced a fast and website, then you will not close the close button, you will stay on the sites longer.
Increased reliability
A cluster with a minimum of 2 servers will allow you to do maintenance to your website while remaining online. For example, your server stop working, but your WordPress website keeps working. You will be able to upgrade software, upgrade the OS.
Then you can test them first before re-adding to the cluster. End users will not realize you are doing maintenance, nearly 100% they won’t notice it. This 100% online will build your website reputation and reliability since users may access your sites at random times. Also, this is the answer if you have ever wondered why some huge social media sites are capable of handling multiple tasks while it seems always online, only they use a more complex cluster of course.
Better security
If a hacker manages to gain root access to your sites, the other services on another server will remain safe. The more services the hacker gets access to means the bigger problem.
With a cluster, some services might be compromised or hacked, but some services will be running safe and sound. This might allow you to rebuild and save your sites.
Better hardware utilization
Multiple servers will allow the servers to do the tasks more focused. This will lead to better hardware utilization that means less support and cheaper operating costs.
It seems the initial costs may look more expensive, especially if you are starting the cluster from very basic or scratch. However, clustered shared hosting will bring more advantages overtimes to your sites.
You may have better hardware utilization which means less support that will make the costs for operation will slightly reduce. You will have a more reliable, fast, and secured shared hosting platform that will boost your site’s overall performance that will be very useful to build your reliability.
Building a cluster can be manually set up using many OS servers, however, it is a little bit unpractical especially if you are new to this field.
However, you can check Cloudjiffy, a WordPress Cluster hosting for easier installation with a very valuable offer. With every cluster you get:
- LiteSpeed ADC or NGINX load balancer for distributing the incoming traffic
- LiteSpeed Web Server or NGINX PHP servers with preconfigured automatic scaling
- Highly-available MariaDB Galera Cluster or MySQL master-slave replication
- Redis caching and Shared Storage
- Let’s Encrypt SSL pre-installed as an add-on
- Premium CDN integration for lightning-fast static assets loading
- Web Application Firewall in LiteSpeed Web Server
- Layer-7 Anti-DDoS Filtering for protection against botnet traffic
- WordPress Multisite Networking
You can get their 14 Days trial with no credit card required.
By using a service like CloudJiffy you will get a highly available WordPress cluster environment easily using their automated system. CloudJiffy also provides auto-scaling with monitoring. This way you’ll feel more hassle-free in handling your WordPress website in a clustered environment.
