35 servers. 99.97% Uptime. 88 outages. 637 ms response
A steady month in the world of WordPress cloud-servers saw 88 occurences of downtime, 41 of which were planned across 35 web servers.
We extensively use Amazon AWS to host WordPress sites, as well as the excellent WPEngine Platform as a Service and we’ve seen steady improvements in performance as we’ve upgraded service across all our sites in the last 2 months.
We’re still fighting one or two monsters that suffer slow response times (>750ms) but we’re well on the way to fixing those. We served and managed an estimated half a billion web requests during July and despite showing 88 outages in total no single unplanned service outage was for more than 15 minutes.
In 2009 (prior to using the cloud) it would be normal to see one or two periods of extended outage in the month and response times would be a good deal longer. Additionally, we had a staff of 3 people managing servers, back-end software platforms and systems code. Today, we have no full-timers.
WordPress as a Platform has been revolutionary for us, it greatly simplified the management of WordPress sites and that means lower costs, faster response and happier clients.
