Didn't find a similar question here on SO. There's an old, closed question (2011) on WordPress SE, where page.ly (not free, premium service, hundreds of dollars a month) and WPEngine (also not free, plans start from $25/mo) are mentioned. Any other, free alternatives?
I use Google Cloud to host WordPress, and their Always Free Tier Compute Engine Instance is enough for a small personal site.
It is a little bit more complicated to setup than WPEngine, but the easiest way to host WordPress on Google Cloud is to use a prebuilt image from the Google Cloud Marketplace. I use images created by Bitnami, such as this one: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/bitnami-launchpad/wordpress
On the Configuration page, you will need to adjust the machine size to be "Micro" and make sure the Region is one of the regions mentioned on the Free Tier page.
The estimated cost will say something like $5.13, but if you have everything configured in a way that matches up with the Compute Engine section of the Free Tier page, it will show up on your bill at $0. Of course there are other things Google Cloud may charge you for, such as if you go over the 1GB data transfer limit, but even so your hosting could be pretty inexpensive if your site is not too busy.
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I have been looking for many blog and site to deploy the Wordpress website multi-region on cloud platform.
I have go through GCP App Engine and Kubernetes but didn't find much.
How to create a database connection from another region and how to manage WordPress media and sync them across the regions. also i am looking for auto-scaling on website.
For database we can use cross region read replica but how to handle the media data and sync them across all the instances in different regions.
To deploy highly available and scalable wordpress architectures on AWS, I would suggest to read this white paper https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/wordpress-best-practices-on-aws/
The key to multi region deployment is to have a copy of the data in both regions. This comes with a lot of challenges if you do consider to have two database masters, i.e. where the write operations can happen (In wordpress words, a write happens when you author a post or when customers are leaving comments)
Having a cross-region read replica is possible with Amazon RDS since 2013 : https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cross-region-read-replicas-for-amazon-rds-for-mysql/
For master-master setup, have a look at Amazon Aurora Global Database (compatible with MySQL) : https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/global-database/ But i would seriously question why you want to do that first.
[UPDATE 17 July 2019]
I just found out that the bitnami distribution of Wordpress has a documentation explaining how to use S3 for media files : https://docs.bitnami.com/aws/apps/wordpress-pro/configuration/wordpress-aws-s3/
I will post this answer even though there are better answers. This answer provides additional information on one particular design.
I have deployed multi-region WordPress on both AWS and Google Cloud. WordPress is simply not designed for this. Unless you have money to spend and IT talent, choose a company that offers distributed WordPress managed. You will save money and headaches.
For the last project, the company did not require instant updates/synchronization globally but required high traffic loads that could be predicted. We decided upon separate WordPress systems in each region. We wrote software that ran once per hour to synchronize the WordPress content between systems. This involved syncing the file system wp-uploads directory, moving static assets to cloud storage behind a CDN and copying content changes to each MySQL database. If there was a conflict, an email was sent to an admin to manually review. Once per day software ran that compared the newest posts to verify content and synchronization between servers.
The systems in each region were load-balanced and auto-scaled. The database was hosted separately on managed MySQL servers. The WordPress directory was hosted on an NFS share. We used cloud storage + CDN for static assets (css, js, images, downloads). Except for cloud storage, we did not share assets between regions. Each region was independent. Each region has at least two servers running at all times. During forcasted peak loads (marketing releases, events, etc.) we would scale up/down each group based on timezone via a GUI click to prewarm the systems.
Does anyone know of any free servers that do a reasonable job of hosting a simple Drupal site? I know of Heliohost but after trying it I found it to be very slow (you get what you pay for clearly), but based on your experience are there any suggestions?
You have to choose either free or Drupal, as it is Ram-greedy beast, you cannot feed it with free social sandwiches.
However, you can try cheap hosting plans, few years ago I used to host about 20 small Drupal sites on a $50/year account.
I'm migrating to an ecommerce platform that would help me sell my products online to a wider user base. I am told Shopify/Zepo is an online shop for small businesses and Magento/woocommerce are solutions. What exactly is the difference between a "shop" and "solution"? Or what if I build a site from scratch? Where do I start from?
Shopify/Zepo are SaaS ecommerce platforms which can handle milions of visits/transactions per day if your store is a real success.
Magento/woocommerce are 'own hosted' tools/platforms.
Both are ok to start with, but if you think you'll do good, be careful on the last ones. They might seem cheap at the beginning but they can eventually ruin your business.
When starting it's always wiser to start with a SaaS tool which has no upfront costs and allow you to download all your data (products, customers, orders) in case you want to move to another platform.
Starting with Magento or WooCommerce will force you to have a sys team or a web developer almost permanently doing server-packages updates and so, let alone security, performance and scalability issues.
I do not believe using an off-the-shelf SAAS alone will ever be enough for a successful ecommerce website.
If you want to have a successful ecommerce solution you will need at least a good web developer to keep your site up-to-date.
Moreover, there will be many opportunities such as integration with your back-end systems that an off-the-shelf SAAS might not be able to handle.
My advice is to find a good technical resource, even if it's just one web developer, and build your product together - invariably it's more about people than technology or platform.
We need to use WordPress for a site that is going to have high traffic. We expect an initial load of 500K page views a month and will increase to about 8M page views a month. Usage will be mainly during working time, which is around 20 days a month during 8 hours.
We are thinking on using Google App Engine with Google Cloud SQL. We were wondering how well it scales for that kind of load. Theory says Google App Engine should scale automatically, but not sure how good is Google Cloud SQL when scaling. This will be a mostly read database, which a few writes.
So the questions are:
Does anyone has experience deploying WordPress on Google App Engine + Google Cloud SQL with a high load?
Do you know if there are problem installing plugins for WordPress on Google App Engine? Do they need any especial modification?
To save you some time, look to other solutions.
I'm working on this exact task now, but I'm about to give up due to Cloud SQL's very poor performance. It might work fine for websites like Orane's, but for larger more complex websites the high latency and slow response time from Cloud SQL means for us 3 second load times instead of 0.7s that we have on our VPS. I have tested by connecting to both IP and Socket, SSL and without, and it's just not usable as-is. If you test with Amazon RDS, the difference in speed is shocking.
The only other solution we've been able to come up with is to set up an API server that continously caches data to memcache and only serve static pages on App Engine with most dynamic content loading through AJAX. Scary!
Keep trying, but you'd be better off looking into RackSpace Cloud DB or Amazon RDS.
There are no problems at all and it doesn't need any modifications. Everything works perfectly and from previous projects I've done on appengine, I know it scales extremely well. I've just set up my new wordpress blog on appengine here and everything works the same but loads a lot faster. Its a little tricky to get setup however..I'm working on a tutorial for that.
So, I've been setting my sights on MS Azure for quite awhile as my top hosting choice. I have a trial account and since I am still in the development phase of my ASP project, I wouldn't want to have to spent a cent yet.
However after a month, the issue of how I am going to host my website came into mind. I haven't tried Azure yet, however assuming I want to host it privately or using a VPS to save costs, how exactly do I transition my project for hosting?
Azure has a toolkit which handles the uploading and whatnot for me, however if I engage in VPS services, how do I set-up my website and will the cost difference be something worth looking at?
A lot depends on what your needs are. "Hosting an ASP.Net website" covers a pretty broad spectrum from a simple one-page site that no one but you and a couple friends look at to a complex and highly trafficked site like StackOverflow. Telling you what you need to do to host your site is impossible without more details. However, to get you started with some basic information so that you can ask a better question I recommend you start with this page, scroll down to the paragraphs labelled "Web Sites" and "Cloud Services".