Deployment Scenarios For WPCloudDeploy

When you use an SaaS service or a classic host to manage your WordPress servers and sites, you have a single deployment scenario for your WP Control Panel – theirs.

And in most cases that works just fine.

But sometimes you need some flexibility. Or some peace of mind with redundancy. Or you have unique privacy and regulatory requirements.

This is exactly where WPCD really shines.

When you use WPCloudDeploy, you have so many more options…

1. Single Instance Deployment

This is the most common deployment and equates to the type of deployment option you have with most SaaS services. It is a single instance of WPCD on a single server, managing multiple WP servers and sites. Data about all your sites and servers live in the same database in a single WP instance.

You can use our teams functionality combined with WP Capabilities to manage access to different features and functions.

And for most use-cases, this is the preferred deployment scenario.

2. Multiple Instances on a Single Server

However, you can also install multiple instances of WPCD on a single server. Remember, WPCD just requires a WP site and you can install multiple WP sites on a single server.

Why might you want to do this?

• Better security if you’re trying to segment server and/or site access by employee or employee roles. Each employee / role can be given logins to different instances of WPCD on the same server.
• Segment Sites and Servers by customer type – for example, you might place servers and sites from customers that rarely need changes into one instance and more demanding customers on other instances.
• Segment Sites and Servers by use-cases. For example, you might decide to have one instance for internal servers or servers that you manage yourself and another that is integrated with WooCommerce for selling server subscriptions where the customer manages the servers themselves.

There are other scenarios of course. But hopefully you can start to see possibilities when using multiple WPCD instances.

3. Single Instances on Multiple Servers

With this deployment option you are creating multiple instances of WPCD, placing each on on a different server/VM.

Why might you do this?

For the same reasons we mentioned above in the Multiple Instances on a Single Server scenario.

In this case though, you start to build in some redundancy. You can deploy WPCD on servers located at different providers and in different regions.

If one of your providers go down or a region becomes inaccessible then not all your customers are impacted – most of your servers and sites will still be accessible via the WPCD servers that remain up and running at other providers / regions.

This becomes even more powerful when you start to use our Metadata Syncing functions.

You might also use this deployment scenario if you have regulatory concerns.

For example, you might choose to deploy a WPCD instance at a European data center to manage your servers and sites for customers located in Europe.

Or if a large client really really wanted to be isolated from everyone else, you can grant them their own WPCD instance.

In the most extreme case you might deploy one WPCD instance for most of your customers but a heavily customized version for one or two very special cases.

4. Single Instance on a Multisite Network

This is definitely a highly specialized scenario. We’re thinking of a situation where you might decide to resell WPCD services, similar to how we handle it now on FireupWP.

You would install WPCD under WPUltimo and then charge customers for their own unique WP management dashboard under your brand.

5. Scalable & Distributed WaaS Services

If you want to create a WordPress as a Service business but don’t want to use WP Multisite, you can use WPCD to sell individual sites, deployed on multiple servers on multiple providers in multiple regions.

With this deployment scenario, your WaaS does not completely shut down if a single server or site is compromised. And you get the advantages of rolling upgrades, better compatibility with existing plugins and more.

Build An Infinitely Scalable & Geographically Distributed WaaS Service!

Wrapup

An SaaS service cannot easily allow many of the kinds of segmentation options we’ve described above. In fact, you might have even thought about some of the issues mentioned above but ignored them because you didn’t think that your ideas were possible.

But now you know – with WPCD it is possible!

You can even run multiple business brands by simply deploying multiple WPCD instances, each branded individually. Different brands for different regions, different brands for different market segments etc.

Sweet, right?

Do you have a different deployment idea? If so, drop us a note and let us know – we’ll add it to this article.