Automated failover

Every WP Cloud site has primary and secondary origin servers in different geographic data centers. Real-time replication keeps the servers synchronized so WP Cloud can redirect traffic when the primary server or its data center is unavailable.

Real-time replication

The primary and secondary servers mirror one another. They run the same software and contain synchronized data for every site assigned to the server pool. WP Cloud continuously replicates data from the primary to the secondary in real time.

Keeping the copies in different geographic data centers protects sites from a localized infrastructure failure or natural disaster affecting one location.

Monitoring and traffic failover

WP Cloud continuously monitors the primary server for failures and degraded performance. When monitoring detects a problem, WP Cloud systems assess whether traffic must move to the secondary server.

When failover is necessary, WP Cloud immediately redirects traffic to the secondary server in another geographic data center. A failover can change the site’s active origin location and outbound address, so integrations must not assume those values are permanent.

After WP Cloud restores the primary server, traffic automatically returns to it.

Graceful failover for cached pages

Graceful failover is separate from origin server and data-center failover. If a plugin, theme, or code error makes an origin return an HTTP 5xx response, a site using Edge Cache may serve a cached version of the page instead.

Graceful failover can keep an already cached page available, but it does not repair the origin error or provide a cached response for content that was not already eligible and stored.