Category: Case Study

In the world of web development, WordPress agencies are always striving to stay competitive and provide exceptional service to clients. One constant challenge is WordPress hosting.

WordPress hosting requires a complex balancing act. You have to balance cost, performance and ability to handle traffic spikes and website growth. This is where serverless can make a real difference.

Serverless is a new approach that’s changing how we build and deploy web applications. But why should this matter to WordPress agencies? In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of serverless and how it can revolutionize your agency’s operations.

I gave a talk on serverless PHP at LonghornPHP 2022. This is the companion article I wrote for it. If you’re just looking for the slides, click here.

For PHP developers, servers occupy a weird space in our lives. We can’t work without them. But, for most of us, managing them is something that we’d rather avoid. Instead, we’re happy to pay for hosting companies to take the pain away.

But hosting companies don’t remove all your hosting headaches. If you’re managing a server yourself (or with the help of a tool like Laravel Forge or SpinupWP), you’re still on the hook if something happens and you still have to maintain them. (Ubuntu LTS still has a end of life! 😅)

And even with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), you’re not completely off the hook. You have to worry about scaling. This often leaves you overpaying for hosting because you have to be on a plan that can handle the worst-case scenario.

These are some problems that serverless PHP addresses. With serverless PHP, you pay for what you use. If your PHP application isn’t receiving any traffic, you’re not paying to keep a server online. But, at the same time, you get an infrastructure that can scale to handle thousands of requests within a minute.

One of the major challenges of using Ymir to host a WordPress site on AWS Lambda is estimating cost. AWS uses usage-based pricing for a lot of its services. This makes calculating the cost of hosting a WordPress site on AWS challenging.

I’ve been running my personal site on AWS Lambda for a few months now. This has given me a few months of data on the cost of host a WordPress site using Ymir. While this is just one example, it’s still an excellent opportunity to look at the real world cost of using AWS Lambda to host a WordPress site.