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.
Scaling Effortlessly with Serverless
Let’s start with one of the biggest selling points of serverless: scalability. In traditional hosting, dealing with traffic spikes and website growth can be a real headache. (Traffic spikes are especially common with WooCommerce sites.) You’re constantly trying to ensure your sites can handle increased traffic without performance issues.
Often, you’ll do that by upscaling the server or hosting plan during periods of high traffic. But then, you’re left having to decide when to downscale and manually do it. Keep it upscaled too long or forget and you’re stuck footing the bill for that larger server or hosting plan.
But with serverless, that headache disappears. Serverless platforms allocate resources automatically, allowing your website to scale effortlessly. There’s no need for manual intervention or continuous adjustments to server configurations. This allows you to have the flexibility to upscale and downscale without the risk of ending up with an unnecessarily high hosting bill.
This can be a boon for agencies managing multiple client sites with varying traffic patterns. Serverless automatically meets the needs of each WordPress site without overprovisioning resources. Plus, as your clients’ businesses grow, their WordPress sites can scale seamlessly to meet their growing needs.
How Serverless Reduces Hosting Costs
Another major advantage of serverless is its cost efficiency. Traditional hosting often means paying for idle server time or unused resources. But with serverless, you only pay for the compute time your WordPress sites actually use.
This unique, pay-as-you-go pricing model can lead to substantial cost savings. For instance, a website with traffic spikes would need enough server capacity to handle these spikes in a traditional hosting model. However, this server capacity often just sits unused.
In contrast, a serverless platform scales up resources during traffic spikes and scales them down during quieter periods. You only pay for what you use, and there’s no need to remember to downscale manually. If you forget, you’re not stuck footing the bill, as we mentioned in the previous section.
Serverless architecture also eliminates ongoing server maintenance costs. This lets you focus on improving your service offerings or investing in new projects. Areas of your agency that directly contribute to your business growth.
The Performance and Reliability Advantage of Serverless
Serverless doesn’t just offer scalability and cost savings; it also enhances performance and reliability. Now, a serverless function can only be in a single availability region. But serverless platforms typically include a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
The CDN will serve your WordPress site from the location closest to your user. This negates the issue with the single availability zone. It also significantly reduces your latency and improves page load times.
In terms of reliability, a serverless WordPress site is distributed across multiple data centers within an availability region. This reduces the possibility of your WordPress site going down to almost zero. While an entire regional outage could still potentially affect your site, such instances are incredibly rare. And when they happen, they usually take out part of the internet!
Finally, a serverless platform handles all the underlying infrastructure management. This includes routine server maintenance, updates, and patching. This removes a significant operational burden from your team. It also ensures your WordPress sites are always running on the latest, most secure technology.
Using Serverless to Simplify Infrastructure Management
Managing traditional server-based WordPress hosting can be complex. Tasks like server setup, maintenance and security aren’t the primary focus of your agency. It should be to develop outstanding WordPress sites that provide value to your clients.
Switching to a serverless platform can significantly simplify these tasks. They automate responsibilities like server maintenance, scaling, fail-over, and security. This frees up more of your time and energy.
Another benefit of serverless platforms is that they let you create as many environments as you need. This gives you flexibility for experimentation or testing. And the best part is that it doesn’t add complexity or incur significant costs because of the pay-as-you-go pricing.
If a new deployment introduces unforeseen issues, you can easily roll back to a previous, stable version. This enhances your team’s capacity to react to issues quickly.
Leveraging the Built-In Security of Serverless
Countless WordPress sites get hacked daily. This is why it’s critical to ensure the security of your WordPress sites. Hosting a WordPress site on a serverless platform comes with enhanced security measures that offer an upper hand in this area.
When using a serverless platform, the cloud provider is the one responsible for maintaining and securing the underlying server infrastructure. This includes performing regular updates to avoid any exploitation of outdated software vulnerabilities. Serverless platforms, such as Ymir, build your serverless infrastructure on cloud providers like AWS. These cloud providers have robust security protocols, which add an extra layer of protection against potential hacks.
An important security aspect of serverless platforms is the immutability, or read-only nature, of the file system. This significantly reduces the attack surface, largely confining potential attacks to SQL injection attacks.
Finally, serverless platforms like Ymir offer the ability to configure additional security measures. For example, you can add an application firewall to your serverless WordPress sites. This further safeguards them from various cyber threats.
Creating Happier Developers with Serverless
Another advantage of serverless is that it improves developer experience of building WordPress sites. With a serverless platform like Ymir, developers no longer have to spend their time on server setup, maintenance, or scaling. Instead, they can focus more on writing code and creating incredible WordPress sites.
Serverless platforms also let you create separate environments for development, testing, and production. This allows developers to test new features and bug fixes in a secure, isolated environment before deploying them to the live site. It also makes it easy to replicate and troubleshoot issues that occur in the live environment.
Lastly, serverless platforms come with the ability to roll back to a previous deployment if something goes wrong. This gives developers the confidence to experiment and innovate, knowing they can easily revert changes if needed.
These features allow developers to be more productive and deliver better results for clients.
Integrating Serverless with Your DevOps Workflow
Serverless platforms inherently support DevOps practices, allowing them to integrate seamlessly with existing workflows. They enable developers to use CI/CD pipelines which automate testing, building, and deploying applications. This speeds up the development process. It also enhances code quality by identifying and addressing issues early.
As discussed previously, serverless allows you to set up as many environments as necessary. You can integrate these environments into your DevOps process. This allows for isolated, risk-free testing of new features or fixes before they’re deployed to the live site.
Since serverless allows for seemless rollbacks, you can practice continuous deployment safely. It allows you to test live site releases and roll them back if there are issues. This is one of the most desired outcomes of using a DevOps process.
Embracing the Future with Serverless
Serverless technology offers a wealth of benefits for WordPress agencies. From effortless scalability and cost savings to enhanced performance, security, and developer experience, serverless is truly a game-changer.
It also frees up agency developers from a lot of unrelated tasks, such as infrastructure management. This way, they can focus on what they do best: creating outstanding WordPress sites.
By adopting serverless, agencies can stay competitive in the dynamic world of web development. It allows them to deliver better results for clients, and ensure their WordPress sites are always running on the latest, most secure technology. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, serverless is leading the way in transforming how we build and deploy web applications.