29 Apr 2019
What Is WordPress VIP?
If you have a job in marketing, then you've probably heard of WordPress. But have you heard of WordPress VIP? If you haven't, you're not alone. Despite working as a WordPress solution provider for almost 10 years now, I only discovered WordPress VIP very recently myself. So what is WordPress VIP? WordPress VIP is a managed WordPress hosting service for those with enterprise needs. It provides a scalable hosting platform, for a global audience, and is backed by the name and capability of WordPress itself. Under WordPress VIP, experts at WordPress manage your servers and perform quality checks of the code that’s produced. The core WordPress VIP service helps you with:
Hosting
Support
Guidance
If you are an SME, WordPress VIP is unlikely to be a good match for your needs. However, if you are a large enterprise that serves millions of users, has a global audience and you have critical infrastructure needs, then WordPress VIP may be a good option.
What are the benefits of WordPress VIP?
WordPress VIP is an enterprise WordPress solution that provides critically high availability when thousands or millions of dollars are at stake every day. The benefits of WordPress VIP:
The credibility of working with the people that made WordPress
Solution platform optimised for speed
Enterprise level of support and reliability
Redundancy
24/7 support and monitoring
Security management
What are the capabilities of WordPress VIP?
At the end of the day, what does this all mean? Here are the primary capabilities you need to be aware of:
Highly scalable
WordPress VIP is highly scalable, with containerised auto-scaling, cloud-based hosting and multiple data centres around the world. Read more about WordPress VIP's infrastructure model.
Security and hacking protection
WordPress VIP has best-in-class security and hacking protection
Automatic maintenance updates and security patches
Guaranteed best-in-class service provision
Hourly database backups with redundant file storage
Vulnerability scans
Brute force protection
Extensive support
WordPress VIP has an impressive array of WordPress VIP support options. These include:
Planning
Deployments
Issues and Monitoring
For more information about what a WordPress VIP enterprise support engagement looks like.
Integrated elasticsearch
With WordPress VIP, you have the ability to create a search with customisable weightings.
Development quality and workflow
WordPress VIP is actively involved in checking the quality of the code deployed to the WordPress VIP servers. It's not just a matter of your web developers pushing their code to the WordPress VIP servers. While this code quality check does increase the turnaround time for quick development updates, the idea behind it is that by adding an independent code check upfront, urgent deployments are avoided. That’s because the health of the code is improved initially. This then results in improvements to performance, reliability and security.
All code is reviewed for security, performance and coding standards
WordPress VIP will block code that is not acceptable and will make code recommendations
Version control integration with Git
So the bottom line here is that WordPress VIP makes sure your code is written as effectively as it should be.
Examples of companies that use WordPress VIP
WordPress VIP has hosted some of the largest and robust solutions around the world.
WordPress VIP vs Self Hosted WordPress
The major difference between a WIP and self-hosted WordPress would be the confidence in the website’s ability to be bulletproof against malicious attacks, peaks in traffic and code quality.
WordPress VIP
Heavy caching
Autoscaling
Real-time cron jobs for scheduled posts and tasks
24/7 worldwide support
Global Content Delivery Networks and data centres
Code review
Hourly backups
Self Hosted WordPress
Caching needs to be set up and implemented with plugins
Auto-scaling needs to be configured on AWS or a similar service
Cron jobs only fire when a visitor or bot visits the site
Support response times from your host can vary
CDNs need to be manually configured with something like AWS S3 and CloudFront or Cloudflare
No code review (unless your development team does this and is a WordPress specialist)
Limited or infrequent backups
It's important to note that the majority of the websites we work with are with a self-hosted solution provided by Lamb Agency. WordPress VIP is used primarily for mission-critical infrastructure.
Examples of when we recommend WordPress VIP
We recommend WordPress VIP for critical infrastructure projects where downtime is unacceptable. This includes high-traffic sites and 24/7 publishing needs. WordPress VIP is not suitable for small to medium businesses.
Very high-traffic sites (millions of visitors a month)
Public or publishing companies
Companies with a high-risk profile
When 24/7 website availability and monitoring is required
Companies who don't have internal sysops or DevOps team
When a detailed audit and logging is required by the company
Sites that require fast and custom-weighted search results
Key factors when considering WordPress VIP
Considering WordPress VIP is a serious decision. Hosting for WordPress VIP solutions start from $5000/month, and the price increases from there. Your primary driver for considering WordPress VIP, however, isn't the cost, but the loss in credibility or revenue from your website going down. Imagine if Google went down. You still need to search, so what do you do then? Key considerations:
Cost of downtime
Likelihood of being targeted maliciously
Impact on reputation should your website fall over
Volume of traffic
Budget
Who will help you with development of your WordPress VIP website?
Additional Resources for WordPress VIP
Tell us what you think! If you would like to talk to us about this article, drop us a line at greg@lamb.com.au.
Greg is the Managing Director of Lamb Agency, a digital agency focused on creating industry-leading websites.
