Disaster recovery

WordPress VIP maintains a blend of manual and automated procedures for dealing with various equipment or other failures.

WordPress VIP maintains four origin data centers, each with additional capacity that can be used in the event of a prolonged outage. The primary data centers are located in or around Dallas, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Amsterdam.

All WordPress VIP environments are spread across networking (e.g. switch) and power (e.g. rack power) infrastructure, to mitigate against equipment issues with networking or power affecting all the resources assigned with running a given production environment.

All production environment databases are backed up every hour. Backups are encrypted at rest before being replicated to AWS S3 utilizing encryption in transit and retained for 30 days. All customer uploads (e.g. media files) are replicated in near real-time to an additional origin data centers and AWS S3 for redundant storage. Backups can be used to roll back an environment to an earlier state or migrated to different servers or an entirely different origin data center.

For WordPress applications that have Geographic Redundancy enabled, the production environment and its resources can be fully restored and operational at an alternate data center with minimal downtime and data loss if the primary data center experiences a critical failure.

Incident response

WordPress VIP uses an established incident response process (internally referred to as “Breaking” incidents).

There are different leads assigned to different roles, allowing the engineering team to focus on resolving the issue. This also ensures that someone is providing updates to the WPVIP Status page and communicating with impacting customers. Once the incident has been resolved, WordPress VIP follows up with an Incident Report on the Status Page (and directly with any impacted customers that request it) with details about what led to the issue, a detailed timeline of events, and preventative measures that have been put in place (or are being explored) to prevent a similar scenario from occurring again.

Premier customers can request additional follow up actions by email, a ticket, or a quick phone call if desired.

Getting help

The status of the WordPress VIP Platform can be referenced at all times at the WPVIP Status page.

Though VIP has 24×7 automated monitoring, customers can contact WordPress VIP Support by creating a Support ticket using the Urgent priority level if there is an issue with an application not loading.

Support tickets filed with Urgent priority level immediately alert the on-call team who will to respond as soon as possible (often well-within a customer’s defined urgent SLA).

Urgent tickets should only be used for outages, security issues, or workflow-blocking concerns. Remember to include as many details as possible to help WordPress VIP Support solve the issue more quickly.