Today, WordPress is undoubtedly the most popular CMS powering nearly 80% of blogs on the internet. Bloggers all around the world prefer this open source CMS as it is easy to use and maintain their blogs without much headache. Being most popular and stable CMS, hosting it on right platform and securing it from hackers should be the highest priority of all bloggers and the blogging community as a whole.
Most of the new bloggers and especially those who receive less traffic consider hosting their WordPress Blogs on shared servers which is quite cheap. There is no harm in this approach as new comers cannot afford to or are not sure of their blog’s success. However, these days Cloud VPS providers such as DigitalOcean provide VPS at cheaper rates sometimes even more cheaper than some of the popular shared hosting providers across the globe.
Shared servers are overloaded with hundreds and thousands of websites that receives moderate traffic and consume less system resources. However, they affect on site’s overall performance and page loading speed of the site. A blogger does not have full control of the server and hence cannot optimize his or her blog the way he or she wants to.
Also, these days tools such as EasyEngine makes blogger’s job handling WordPress site much easier and hence, it would be advisable to a WordPress blogger to migrate his or her blog on the cloud.
Here are few points that will help you understand the benefits of moving your WordPress Blog to the Cloud:
1. Total Control
Running WordPress in a VM will give you the best possible control and configuration options. You can password protect your directories, enhance site’s as well as server security, tweak the configuration files, tune web and database servers to maximize their performance, install plugins that require advance permissions and use only those packages or services that your site requires. This also helps in improving site’s performance to a much greater extent.
2. Easy Scale-up or Scale-out
When your blog becomes popular and the traffic grows exponentially, you can choose to scale the infrastructure. It is possible to move to the next level of configuration that comes with more CPU power, memory and storage with minimal downtime. With the right architecture, it is also possible to run your WordPress blog on multiple virtual servers that share the load. You can scale up or down your cloud server with a single reboot and hence your blog only uses system resources as per traffic and load on the server
3. Higher Availability
When the traffic grows and your site is getting popular, one thing which is of your great concern is the downtime. Most of the cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, DigitalOcean and Google offer a multi-zone deployment option. With this, you can spread your servers across isolated, fault-tolerant and independent zones within a single geographic region. Also, you can deploy a redundant architecture with two or more web servers, database servers and load balancing. This prevents single point of failure and increases up time of your site to nearly 100%.
4. Improved Performance
Cloud offers a variety of options to enhance the performance of the WordPress Site.We already discussed how the web servers and database servers can be scaled according to the traffic and usage of system resourcesfor better performance. You can also take advantage of Content Delivery Networks (CDN), a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages and other Web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user. By caching assets like images, CSS and Javascript files, the pages will load faster offering a better experience to the consumers. It also reduces the load on the web server by delegating the load to the CDN and storage. Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare are few popular CDN providers worldwide.
5. Security
WordPress is the most popular CMS, hence hackers are always trying their best to find loopholes, attack sites and ultimately hack them for various reasons. Cloud servers gives root privileges or access that can be used to deploy WordPress server architecture, password protect important directories and monitor access logs more deeply.Setting up custom security for your WordPress blog and server will always help you prevent hacking attacks from hackers and overcome vulnerabilities to a greater extent.
If you have a WordPress blog or Site and looking at better performance, scalability and reliability, it’s time for you to consider migrating your WordPress Blog or Application to the cloud.
