For mission-critical WordPress sites, downtime is not acceptable. Load balancing and high availability architecture ensure your site stays online even when servers fail.

Understanding High Availability

High availability means your site continues working when components fail. No single point of failure should take down the entire system.

Load Balancer Layer

Load balancers distribute traffic across multiple web servers. Options include AWS ALB/ELB, Google Cloud Load Balancing, HAProxy, Nginx, and Cloudflare Load Balancing.

Web Server Layer

Run multiple web servers (2+ minimum for HA). Use auto-scaling to add servers during traffic spikes. Handle sessions with Redis/Memcached. Sync files using shared storage or S3.

Database Layer

Run primary database for writes and replicas for reads. Use managed services like AWS RDS or Google Cloud SQL for automatic failover.

Caching Layer

Use Redis or Memcached cluster for object caching.

Architecture Example

Internet – CDN – Load Balancer – Web Servers (auto-scaled) – Redis Cluster – Database Primary + Replicas

Monitoring

Monitor all components: server health, database performance, cache hit rates. Alert immediately on failures.

Need HA architecture? Contact us.