Infrastructure overview

Your application is built within layers of infrastructure designed to enhance the security and performance of your sites.

Some security and performance features are automatically implemented to protect and support your site. Security monitoring and firewalls are built in to the infrastructure, and web server environments will autoscale during high traffic events.

Other security and performance features—like rate limiting for failed login attempts and page cache behavior—are set to optimized defaults, but can be customized to suit the needs of your application.

The page cache

The page cache is the first layer of WPVIP’s infrastructure that is encountered by every request made to a WordPress or Node.js environment. The page cache determines whether a request will be served a cached response or if a request must be be routed to an origin server. The default behaviors of the page cache are designed to protect the health of your application by minimizing the number of requests made to your origin servers, while also ensuring that cached content is not stale.

Cached content is served by WPVIP’s content delivery network (CDN). This is a global network of edge cache servers that are each used to store and serve content closest to the end user requesting content from your site.

The VIP File System

In a typical WordPress installation, uploaded media files are stored in a file system located within the site’s web container. On WPVIP, uploaded files are stored in a separate, external service called the VIP File System.

All of the contents of a WordPress site’s /wp-content/uploads/ directory are mapped to the VIP File System. The VIP File System’s read-only setting provides better security against the creation or execution of malicious scripts, and as an external object store it allows VIP’s CDN to more easily scale access to a site’s media files.

The VIP File System also has built-in services such as automatic conversion of images to next-gen formats, and dynamic generation of requested image sizes. The dynamic image generation feature makes the creation of separate files for every registered image size (i.e. “intermediate files”) unnecessary. Separate intermediate files (e.g. example-150x150.jpg) will not be generated after your site has migrated to WPVIP. Instead, your images will be served at the registered intermediate sizes on-demand.

Software management

The software running on your environments—like WordPress, PHP, and Node.js—is under constant development. When new versions are released, WPVIP will ensure that they are available to your team for upgrades and testing as soon as possible.

Only versions of software that are eligible for security updates will remain available for use on your environments. If security patches or other protections to mitigate critical vulnerabilities become available for current software versions, the WPVIP team will promptly deploy the updates throughout the platform.