Title: Infrastructure overview
Author: WordPress VIP Documentation
Published: November 25, 2024
Last modified: April 16, 2025

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 1. [Guidebooks](https://docs.wpvip.com/guidebooks/)
 2. [Get started on VIP](https://docs.wpvip.com/guidebooks/get-started/)
 3. Infrastructure overview

#  Infrastructure overview

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

It is important that the developers on your team are aware of VIP’s unique infrastructure
and understand how it works. If you are a content creator, you will not need to 
understand all of the content below, but we encourage you to read it at least once
to familiarize yourself with the platform.

## 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.

[Read more about the page cache](https://docs.wpvip.com/caching/page-cache/)

## 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.

[Read more about the VIP File System](https://docs.wpvip.com/vip-file-system/)

## 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.

[Read more about software management](https://docs.wpvip.com/infrastructure/environments/software-management/)

## Security

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.

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.

[Read more about security on WPVIP](https://docs.wpvip.com/security/)

Last updated: April 16, 2025

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