VIP File System

On the VIP Platform, media files that are uploaded to a WordPress site are not stored in a filesystem that is local to the web container. Instead, an API is used to store the uploaded files in a separate read-only service called the VIP File System. The VIP File System is an external, globally distributed object store.

All of the contents of a WordPress site’s /wp-content/uploads/ directory are mapped to the VIP File System. This design provides better security, allows VIP’s CDN to more easily scale access to a site’s media, and enables the WordPress application to automatically horizontally scale more efficiently across multiple hosts.

The VIP File System provides high performance access to media files associated with a WordPress site. When browsers request these files, they are served through a dedicated system using the same domain as the site, with a long time to live (TTL). Some third-party performance scans may not recognize VIP’s CDN due to content being served from the same domain as the site hosted on VIP.

• All common operations, including uploads, cropping, editing, and deleting, work as expected through the WordPress Admin dashboard.
• The File System provides dynamic image resizing and image transformation.
• Separate files are not created for intermediate images. Instead, the intermediate size of an image is dynamically generated at the time of a request.
• Media files can be imported to the File System with VIP-CLI, and a site’s or environment’s media files can be exported from the VIP Dashboard.
• Media files uploaded or imported to a WordPress production environment are automatically shared with the associated non-production environments. When a data sync from a production environment to a non-production environment is completed, the target environment loads the shared media files automatically.
• By default, files on the VIP File System are cached by NGINX with a Cache-Control HTTP header set to cache-control: max-age=31536000 (1 year). This cannot be modified.
• Cached content for media files can be purged by resource URL in the VIP Dashboard or with the VIP-CLI command vip cache purge-url.