An excerpt from http://www.sitepoint.com/boost-wordpress-drupal-performance-pantheon/, by @ceeb
This post was sponsored by Pantheon. Thank you for supporting the sponsors who make SitePoint possible!
Consider the typical tasks involved when deploying your WordPress or Drupal website to a new web host…
- Sign-up and create a new environment.
- If you’re using a dedicated or virtual server, install and/or configure a web server, PHP, MySQL and other dependencies.
- Create a new database with a user ID and password.
- Upload several megabytes of application code.
- Edit the application’s configuration parameters.
- Run the installer process.
- Upload, install and configure third-party themes and plugins.
- Add your content.
- Test. Swear. Hit your keyboard. Fix the problems. Repeat testing again.
- Redo the whole process for your test, staging and production environments.
And then your problems really start…
- Updates can be difficult to deploy everywhere
- A traffic spike caused by a popular article or advertising campaign can bring the server to a halt at the worst possible moment
- A DoS attack can be catastrophic for every site hosted on the same environment
- The website is difficult to scale as you grow
- Hardware and software updates can cause outages or compatibility problems.
The process may be manageable for a couple of installations but consider hosting a few dozen websites – or thousands. Managing multiple WordPress or Drupal sites is time-consuming, tedious, error-prone and prevents you away working on tasks which add real value.
Can Cloud Hosting Help?
To some extent, yes. However, cloud hosting typically requires one or more separate virtual machines for every site. VMs are large, expensive and still rely on significant hardware resources to scale effectively. The traditional approach to scaling also requires considerable manual intervention by systems administrators or DevOps. Modern Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers such as AWS and Rackspace make it easy to provision new VMs to handle additional workload but someone, somewhere needs to stitch those additional servers together. Deployment takes time – and that may be too late for your traffic spike.
Step One to Saving Your Sanity: Use Version Control
If you’re not using version control it’s time to start. Git is a great choice but any solution is better than none. Version control can be used to create a stable deployment process to improve your workflow. Ideally:
Team members will have access to their own, separate development environments which allow them to update or create new features on separate code branches.
Content – such as your WordPress pages, posts and images – are synchronized from the live environment to all development and staging systems. The team can then work against an accurate snapshot of reality which is critical for a full understanding of the system.
Automated quality-assurance tests ensure new code is tested prior to deployment. It should be impossible for problematic features to reach the live server.