Today we launch our Woop! WordPress hosting service. We are pretty excited about this.
Many of our RimuHosting customers run WordPress on the VMs they host with us. That makes sense since 30% of the world’s sites run on WordPress. For over a decade we have been working with these customers to keep their WordPress installs up to date and secure. As well as working with them to make their sites load quickly, and have up to date SSL certs.
With so many customers wanting to run WordPress, and after seeing so many different setups, we wondered:
If we had our way, what would the ideal WordPress setup look like?
-Some guys (and Liz) at RimuHosting
Well, we’d want to make it easy to get going. So that anyone who needed a website (which is everyone, right?) could use the service. So to achieve that we provide an easy signup form. You need to make one DNS change. And then the site is live and ready to be used.
We didn’t want our Woop! clients to have to worry about managing a server. So while we provide all the access you need to your site, you don’t need to know anything about ‘servers’ to operate a Woop! site. We fully manage your server and keep both WordPress site as well as the server secure and up to date.
Make it hassle-free.
– Peter, the boss
Performance is important. So from our experience and research we assembled what we think is a best of breed hosting stack. Front end web caches, modern PHP versions, generous default server limits on things like upload sizes, and concurrent connections. If you’re a techie then we use things like FPM, Nginx, and all the caches: Varnish Cache, Redis Cache, W3 SuperCache. The software runs on our own hardware which will be a modern dual processor server with SSD-backed storage.
Security should be (but often isn’t) near the top of list of requirements for any website you run. Hackers are constantly working to compromise websites, so they can host malware and steal information. To make life harder on hackers we automate distro software updates, as well as WordPress and plugin updates. We keep a minimal ‘attack profile’ by exposing only the required ports. We install a web application firewall (WAF) that detects common web attacks and blocks those remote connections.
We looked at the best way to provide a scalable and secure setup. We considered shared hosting where different customers run on the same server, but are prevented – if configured correctly – from accessing other websites on the same server by having a different user account. We considered containers (like Docker). There were a few internal discussions which ended with:
Just set each customer up in their own VM. Then they will get their own IP, their own disk image. And not have to rely on complex container configuration rules to enforce privilege separation. Other customers won’t impact performance. And we can ultimately even use VMs to provide dedicated hardware to larger sites. VMs may be overkill, but we have proven their performance and reliability.
– Peter, again. He’s been saying the same thing since 2003.
So: Looking to setup a new website (or redo an old one)? Want to use WordPress? Want something fast and secure that you don’t have to worry about? Want that hosted near you (and you happen to live near Sydney, Auckland, Dallas, or Frankfurt)? Have your own domain name? Head over and sign up for your Woop! site.
WordPress is open source software used to create sites, blogs, and apps. It is popular, easy to use and versatile.
RimuHosting has been providing hassle-free hosting since 2003. The Woop! WordPress hosting service extends their managed solution offerings which includes Zonomi for DNS, 25Mail.st‘s managed email hosting, Pingability’s uptime monitoring and Bakop the offsite backup service.