Leveraging AWS to Accomplish Site Auto-Healing

We’ve all been there. You check your site in the morning and it’s down. You call tech support and you’re put on hold. In the meantime, you are losing potential business.

Why does this happen? If you are using WordPress, site problems can be caused by an outdated or unsupported PHP version, an outdated or poorly coded WordPress theme, or an outdated or buggy WordPress plugin.

At Easy Cloud, we mitigate these technical issues that cause downtime using several strategies.

First, we turn on uptime monitoring for every one of our customer sites. Within 15 minutes of a site experiencing a technical issue, our Support Team is alerted and we start investigating. In fact, our Support Team is constantly monitoring the health of our server fleet via AWS CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail 24×7.

Second, unlike many hosting providers who stuff hundreds or even thousands of sites on a single server, at Easy Cloud, many of our customers run their site on a dedicated server. Even if you are on a Shared Hosting plan, your site will be hosted on a server with no more than 9 other sites. This approach ensures that your site has access to all (or close to all) of a server’s compute resources.

Third, our system is set to install WordPress core updates, WordPress theme updates, WordPress plugin updates as well as Ubuntu security updates as soon as they become available. Site performance and security remain our top priorities.

Lastly, we use CloudWatch Alarms that trigger automatic reboots of servers whenever a server’s CPU or memory exceeds an average of 80% over a period of 5 minutes. Server reboots allow site(s) to recover in less than 1 minute, which resolves 99.9% of all technical issues stemming from runaway processes. This auto-healing strategy is one of our secret weapons to keep all of our customer sites humming along.