Full WordPress Security, Stability, and Availability — Not as Elusive As You’d Think
All of our Clients, Including Fortune 500 Companies, Use the Following Setup
The Problem
As popular, customizable, and easy to use that WordPress is as a CMS, many believe that WordPress security, and therefore its stability and availability, is suspect at best. This assumption doesn’t stop companies — even big ones — from continuing to use it.
Given that it’s extremely popular, hackers spend a lot of time learning how best to exploit it. And given that it’s open-source, custom plugins, core files, and various templates that comprise many cobbled-together WordPress sites can greatly affect stability and therefore, availability.
We once had a customer with a gigantic online footprint task us with making their blog’s WordPress site immune from any of these vulnerabilities.
And so we did.
The Solution
WordPress’s noted flexibility allows for everything from zero-to-total customization depending on a website’s needs. This means that WordPress allows for a huge amount of plugin installs, template edits, and core and plugin upgrades, not to mention your everyday post editing and publishing.
Using a two-stage server configuration, we provided an additional layer of security and uptime insurance not found in typical WordPress builds.
Stability: The staging “test” server provides a non-live, private view for any site pages or functionality that could be broken or unintentionally affected by any of these installs, updates, or upgrades. As WordPress doesn’t allow these type of changes to be previewed, the staging server fixes that problem, giving a full view of anything affected by any changes made before they are rolled out to the “live” production server.
Availability: The production servers exist behind Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), so the load on them is distributed evenly. Each instance is replicated from the master production server (both the code and database), so losing an instance would not affect the overall availability of the site.
Security: All new content that is published through the CMS requires vetting from an administrator in this layered approval system, preventing any unapproved content from being published. Though a hacker could certainly exploit a WordPress bug if they had the means, the furthest they could go would be accessing and tampering with one (or a few) of the previously mentioned production “slave” servers, which can be safely shut down for analysis and replaced with the healthy ones until the security issue gets addressed. And or course, this environment still receives the standard scheduled antivirus and vulnerability scans.
The Verification
Though greatly simplified here, this solution implemented as a custom build provided a true expectation of WordPress security for a brand that could not afford to take risks. As the blog site publishes content for readers who speak many different languages, external or internal threats can and do come from literally anywhere in the world — and frequent updates and upgrades are always needed in the world of WordPress.
The site was — and has been — fully stable without any security intrusions or downtime throughout its life under it’s redundantly-secured WordPress CMS. We’ve replicated this setup on many, many more sites since then, and all of our Fortune 500 customers use this — and swear by it.
