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You’re about to go live with a holiday season product launch. The marketing and creative teams have spent weeks preparing. Excitement is high as you finally hit “publish.” But instead of new products, you see a blank page. Your store is down.
The hosting server’s hard drive failed at the worst possible time, taking your site offline when you need it most. Sales and momentum vanish while you scramble for support. This is a worst-case scenario, but it’s a familiar worry for site owners who use traditional WordPress hosting. A lot can go wrong, and when any of a thousand parts fail, the site goes offline.
There is a better approach: high-availability WordPress hosting. With high availability, redundant systems and smart failover keep your site online when hardware fails and networks split. That’s how Pressable can offer every client a 100% uptime guarantee.
In this article, we’ll explore what high availability means, how it works, and the benefits for WooCommerce and WordPress site owners.
The objective of high availability is to build systems without single points of failure. That means no individual system or component should be able to take your WordPress site offline by itself. It sounds simple, but WordPress depends on a complex web of hardware, storage, networks, databases, and software.
If any one of these pieces fails and there’s no immediate backup or workaround in place, visitors see errors or outages. High availability hosting designs every layer of the system with built-in alternatives, so traffic can be rerouted and services can recover instantly.
The high availability commitment is reflected in uptime guarantees. Many standard hosting plans advertise “99.9% uptime”, also known as “three nines” availability. That equates to nearly nine hours of downtime over a year. High availability hosting, by comparison, aims for “five nines,” “six nines” or better. Allowed downtime is minutes or seconds per year.
It’s important to note that high availability involves more than regular backups or plugging in an extra network connection. Backups help you recover lost data after an incident, but they don’t prevent downtime. A redundant network connection is a good idea, but it’s useless if a server or database crashes.
True high availability requires coordinated redundancy and fast failover across every part of your hosting environment, so your site remains available through almost any disruption.
High availability is the result of thoughtful design at every layer of the hosting environment. Here’s how the core components of high availability work in a modern WordPress hosting platform like Pressable.
High availability hosting goes beyond local hardware and network protections by adding geographic redundancy. Your site and its data are replicated across separate, geographically distant data centers. If a regional disruption affects one location, another data center can immediately take over.
Pressable’s geo-redundant architecture replicates your site to a secondary data center. If the primary location becomes unavailable, your website can be quickly and automatically served from the backup site.
Traditional hosting often relies on a single web server for each website, creating a single point of failure. High availability platforms distribute your site across multiple web nodes: servers or containers that can each serve your website independently. The platform can update, repair, or even remove a node without bringing your site offline.
Geographic and local hardware redundancy are essential, but HA systems also need an observer to decide where web requests go. That’s the role of a load balancer. The system continuously checks the health of each node to ensure only healthy, responsive nodes receive new requests.
If a server becomes slow or goes offline, the load balancer instantly reroutes traffic to other healthy nodes, preventing downtime.
On WP Cloud, which powers Pressable, load balancers redirect visitors to the nearest healthy region in seconds. Multi-region, real-time failover ensures that even if an entire data center experiences an issue, your site stays up and accessible.
Learn more about Pressable multi-region failover.
One of the most effective ways to boost availability and speed is to serve your website’s content from multiple locations around the world. A content delivery network (CDN) keeps cached copies of your pages, images, and scripts at dozens of global edge locations.
Even if a data center or server goes offline, visitors can still access your site from a nearby edge location, often with faster load times.
Pressable’s Edge Cache operates at 28 points of presence (PoPs) to reduce latency and shield your site from isolated outages or traffic spikes. Most visitors are served from the edge, so disruptions at the origin rarely affect the end user.
Learn more about Pressable’s Edge Cache.
High availability hosting uses redundant storage solutions that synchronize your uploads, themes, and plugins in real time. That means every relevant node has instant access to the latest files, so your site never suffers from missing images or broken pages during a failover.
On Pressable, media and site files are replicated from the primary server to a secondary server in a different data center, creating full data center redundancies and enabling zero-downtime failover if a failure is detected.
High availability hosting ensures your WordPress site stays accessible, fast, and resilient — even when unexpected problems occur. If you’re ready to experience the difference that high availability can make, explore what Pressable’s managed WordPress hosting can do for your business.
Zach brings a wealth of knowledge to Pressable with more than 15 years of experience in the WordPress world. His journey in WordPress began with creating and maintaining client websites, fostering a deep understanding of the intricacies and challenges of WordPress. Later, his knack for problem-solving and commitment to service led him to pursue a role at Automattic, where he excelled in providing customer support for WooCommerce. His expertise extends beyond technical proficiency to encompass a deep understanding of the WordPress community and its needs. Outside of work, Zach enjoys spending time with his family, playing and watching sports, and working on projects around the house.
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