Title: Disaster recovery
Author: WordPress VIP Documentation
Published: September 17, 2020
Last modified: September 23, 2024

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 1. [Infrastructure](https://docs.wpvip.com/infrastructure/)
 2. Disaster recovery

#  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](https://docs.wpvip.com/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](https://docs.wpvip.com/infrastructure/disaster-recovery/geographical-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](https://wpvipstatus.com/) 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](https://wpvipstatus.com/)
page.

Though VIP has 24×7 automated monitoring, customers can contact [WordPress VIP Support](https://docs.wpvip.com/vip-support/)
by [creating a Support ticket](http://wordpressvip.zendesk.com/) 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](https://docs.wpvip.com/vip-support/#h-information-to-include-in-a-ticket)
to help WordPress VIP Support solve the issue more quickly.

Last updated: September 23, 2024