I started writing about running (or trying to run) a WordPress Multiregion (WPMR) instance of this blog in November of 2021. So over 3 years ago now.
WordPress Multi-Region on Reclaim Cloud
Since then I’ve written eleven posts tagged wpmr that focus on various elements of setting up and running two constantly syncing instances of WordPress across different geographical locations on Reclaim Cloud to ensure 99.999999999999% uptime. If and when one region has down time (it’s really a matter of when not if), the instance will instantaneously failover to a different region that will be both readable and writable. In other words, zero downtime. When the offline version comes back online, any changes will be instantly synced so there’s no missing data between instances of WordPress. As already noted in one of my several posts on WPMR, bavatuesdays doesn’t need an always on failover setup like this—it’s a bit of overkill. That said, it’s nice 🙂
Bava Multi-Region Cluster Cause I Can!
While I do want to pretend my blog is indispensable every hour of every day 365 days a year, the real value is for a top-level .EDU, large instances of WordPress Multisite (WPMS), and/or other high-profile WordPress sites that just can’t go down.
Second Time Around with WordPress Multi-Region
WordPress Multi-Region: Is the Third Time a Charm?
Multiregion: a Year-Long Odyssey
A good part of 2022 was spent working with the Reclaim team to lock-in the WPMR offering, eventually getting it running for both Macalester College’s main .EDU, and soon after Trinity College—which was pretty awesome. As is always the case, this blog was used as a bit of a laboratory. It was a year-long odyssey in which I tried and re-tried to get all the pieces of WPMR working as expected, but the third time was truly a charm.
Flattening the DNS Curve with Cloudflare
Traditionally to run a WPMR for a top-level .EDU site, you need to control the DNS for the main domain. For most schools it would be impossible to provide a third-party like Reclaim that access given how much runs off that main domain, there’s no way they could point their nameservers to Reclaim Hosting. One way around this is to point just a part of their DNS, namely the www subdomain, using CNAME flattening in Cloudflare. This allows us to manage only the www.yourschool.edu subdomain, while leaving the rest of the DNS to function apart from the instances we run at Reclaim. What’s more, once the DNS is pointed at Cloudflare we’re able to manage load balancing, caching, DDoS protection and more.
After we got Reclaim Hosting’s www.reclaimhosting.com running on a multiregion setup, Lauren, Chris, and I did a Reclaim Today episode wherein we discussed the process as we were preparing to go live with Macalester College’s main site just a month later. This was a pretty intense and deeply rewarding few months at Reclaim.
Reclaim Hosting: the Site on the Edgeport of Forever Uptime
Soon after Macalester, we got Trinity College up and running on our multiregion setup, and both have been rock solid since (knock on the proverbial wood). It was also the inspiration to officially roll-out our ReclaimEDU services for schools that use WordPress and want to ensure their website doesn’t go down.
ReclaimEDU
In the spirit of experimentation, we continued to explore other DNS flattening services like EdgePort. While I loved that EdgePort could flatten any subdomain (or sub-subdomain) at a fraction of the cost of Cloudflare,* not to mention the built-in application delivery networks that ensured uptime even if both servers were down, in the end Cloudflare proved a much more stable option.
That brings us pretty much up to date. Looking back most of the WPMR development work was figured out in 2022. Two years later we’re currently going through a new round of WPMR for WPMS setups that offload media to S3 and are built on-top of sub-subdomain wildcard instances—introducing some complexity. The solution for wildcard sub-subdomains Chris worked out is pretty slick—but he’ll talk more about that on the blogosphere anon. I also have another post coming about a recent move of bavatuesdays’s WPMR back to Reclaim Cloud. I transferred it into a brand new multiregion using the Reclaim Cloud marketplace, and it was quite simple and included some new features. I’ll document how to get your own WPMR up and running in Reclaim Cloud shortly, as well as breaking down the specifics for setting up DNS and load balancing in Cloudflare. WPMR is the infrastructure blog gift that keeps on giving.
__________________________________
*Cloudflare makes you go enterprise at the tune of several thousand dollars a month when you want to flatten a sub-subdomain: something like blogs.baruch.cuny.edu or commons.gc.cuny.edu. We were trying to find workable options for our 2024 multi-region projects of CUNY Academic Commons and Blogs @ Baruch –we love you CUNY!