WordPress hosting with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

If you run a business with a website, you probably don’t want to think about the technical details of server hosting. You just want to know that your site is up and running, and that when it’s not, it gets fixed quickly.

For many website owners today, WordPress is their CMS of choice (Content Management System). It’s easy to use, customizable and extensible without being overly complex or difficult to work with. This makes it great for businesses of all sizes because even if you’re just getting started with a small blog or website—or if you’ve been using WordPress for years—there are still plenty of ways you can improve your experience as a webmaster by keeping an eye on your WordPress host’s hardware setup and configuration options.

However, some things aren’t so easy when it comes to hosting and maintaining a WordPress site online: specifically, planning for growth (and dealing with failure) when using cloud-based solutions like AWS S3 buckets or Google Cloud Storage buckets as persistent storage mechanisms for your data files (WordPress core files + plugins + themes). Isolating all those web assets from other websites is a difficult task in most types of hosting environment. Even in some cases they are logically isolated but not totally preventable from accidental misuse or hacking as they are technically using same underlying hardware and encryption technology.

These are where the advantage of the Virtual Private Cloud comes in.

What is Virtual Private Cloud

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a virtual network of isolated resources in the AWS cloud.

VPCs are logically isolated from other virtual networks in AWS and from your on-premises network. You can use these resources to create your own private, isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to run your applications.

VPC closely resembles an on-premises network. You can use it to host your WordPress instance, WordPress plugins, and all associated assets. You can easily connect it to your corporate data center over industry-standard encrypted IPsec hardware VPN connections.

Advantages of hosting WordPress site in VPC

• Isolation. Each VPC is completely isolated from other VPCs, so you can run multiple WordPress sites in different environments without sharing a single IP address or virtual machine. This isolation also helps to reduce security risks because there are no shared infrastructure elements between your applications.
• Flexibility and control over network access. You have direct control over which resources are available outside of your VPC and which ones are accessible only within it, giving you more flexibility than with traditional data centers where everything is always exposed on the internet through public IP addresses assigned by an ISP (Internet Service Provider). In addition, each instance (EC2 instance) in a subnet has its own private IPv4 address range as part of its allocation—this means that even if two instances share an availability zone (AZ), they will still have separate private IP addresses!
• Because of the large number of resources available, VPCs can be configured for massive scale. Each VPC comes with a public IP address and subnet size (fixed or auto-assigned), so you only pay for what you need. You also have the option to connect multiple VPCs together over an encrypted IPsec hardware VPN connection that spans regions and connects your entire infrastructure into one giant private cloud.
• The largest single VPC available can span multiple regions and provides access to more than 65,000 public IP addresses. When you build a site with AWS resources in multiple regions for redundancy and performance, you can create a VPC peering connection between VPCs—essentially creating a global network from local networking building blocks.
• Encryption is built in within a VPC. All the data packets travels through the AWS networks are encrypted with VPC encryption keys. This makes impossible for other network and other VPC components to see through the data in transit.

Conclusion

Now that we’ve covered all the benefits of WordPress hosting in VPC, you can start building and deploying your WordPress website on AWS infrastructure today. We hope this article has helped you understand how to run WordPress in a more secure and scalable environment in AWS with VPC.