Bava Vitals

I’ve been running this blog on WordPress for near on twenty years, and it’s always been a bit of a laboratory. When we were exploring Digital Ocean or Reclaim Cloud for hosting this site often served as the avant garde to get a sense of how things worked. When we started to get deep into the weeds of hosting WordPress Multiregion (WPMR) setups, bavatuesdays took the plunge. This site currently runs from a west coast data center in the US as well as a “hot copy” of the site in a Canadian data center in Montreal. If the west coast data center goes down for any reason, the site seamlessly fails over to a live sync of a writable and readable version in Canada, and no one’s any the wiser. Very slick, if I must say so myself. What’s more, it’s lightning fast! I have become a bit obsessed with checking the load times on GTmetrix just to see if it ever falls under an A grade at 100% performance: it’s a fairly rare occurrence.

Bava Vitals: GTmetrix Grade of A with a performance percentage of 100%. bavalightning!

This setup entails a few things beyond two WordPress instances across two data centers instantaneously syncing files and databases back and forth; there’s a DNS-driven load balancer running through Cloudflare that checks the health of each server and immediately fails over at the first sign of concern. Beyond that, Cloudflare has a robust global CDN that caches files making delivery of content much more efficient. If that wasn’t enough, all files in the wp-content/uploads directory are offloaded to an S3 bucket that provides further separation between the app and uploaded media making content delivery of any non-cached objects that much quicker. The other piece that is key for media heavy sites is that any potential migration becomes that much easier given media never needs to be moved (often the timeliest part of any migration).

The final result is what was traditionally a dog of a WordPress site, namely this old bava blog, has become as fast as any static site I’ve encountered. And this is a PHP driven database with 4,000 posts, 4x as many comments, un-optimized images, embeds galore, and all kinds of other debilitating issues that come with time. I won’t lie, I love having bavatuesdays running on a souped-up setup that’s more appropriate for much larger, traffic heavy sites, but that’s one of the advantages of having an awesome hosting company and being part of the WPMR avant garde!