Understanding High-Availability (HA) Plans

When on one of Pagely’s high-availability (HA) plans, things can be a bit different than a typical managed WordPress hosting plan. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of things you should know when using one of our HA plans.

DNS, Load Balancing, and Pointing Your Domain

Since your site is running off of multiple servers, you might need to point your domain a little differently than accustomed to. This is to ensure that both servers are being properly utilized, and traffic is efficiently balanced across them.

When activating a new HA account or upgrading an existing account to HA, you’ll be provided with a CNAME record for pointing your DNS records to. By using this CNAME record, we’re able to handle load balancing and failover features for you automatically.

If you’re upgrading from an existing non-HA account, you might already be using this CNAME record. Just be sure to double-check your DNS. If so, you’re all set!

If you’re unable to point your DNS to the CNAME record that we’ve provided, you can still get some benefit from HA plans by using two separate A records for round-robin DNS. Please keep in mind that round-robin DNS using A records isn’t recommended since you won’t be able to benefit from the failover features of the ARES gateway.

File Storage and Replication

When making changes to files on an HA account, you’ll always want to make them on the primary node. Since any file replication is automatic and event-driven from the primary node, it’s essential to never make file changes directly on the secondary node.

Because of how file replication works, never use your domain to connect over SSH or SFTP. When making changes to your site, always be sure to use the primary node’s hostname.

Proxy Configuration for Your WordPress Admin

When accessing /wp-admin/ on an HA account, you’ll be automatically routed to your WordPress admin on the primary node. This ensures that changes inside your WordPress admin, such as file uploads to the WordPress media library, are always done on the correct node.

Front-End Uploads and User-Submitted Content

If you're accepting file uploads from users on the front-end of your site (anywhere that's not inside /wp-admin/), you'll want to make sure that this content is being handled by the primary node.

This means that things like accepting file uploads via a form submission or handling other user-submitted files will need to be accounted for. Failure to account for front-end file uploads may result in data loss.

If you're handling any files that are submitted on the front-end of your site, please be sure to let our support team know. They'll be happy to you with proxying the content to your primary node.