I am looking at marrying two Internet giants… WordPress powers more than 40% of all websites and Amazon Web Services (AWS) more than 33% of cloud infrastructure. Specifically, I am working on something that will make it easy for web designers to use AWS serverless technologies to host WordPress websites. Think WordPress with super fast performance and scalability, and no worries about server maintenance.
There are many ways to host WordPress. They very from MEDIOCRE to GREAT in performance, cost and user (web designer) experience. I think I can move all these needles to GREAT by putting WordPress on the serverless* AWS offerings. And I think I can package this in a service that makes it very easy for WordPress designers to publish to AWS. They want to focus on the design of their WordPress websites, and do a “press of the button” publishing to AWS when they are ready.
*Note: Serverless computing means that one is not using a regular web server, but rather cloud compute instances that spring alive on demand. Serverless hosting means there is zero server maintenance and one pays only for the compute time used.
The status quo
Shared hosting is the most popular way to host a WordPress website. It is cheap but tends to be relatively slow. Managed WordPress hosting services such as WPEngine and Kinsta are much more performant, but come at a relatively high price tag.
When it comes to hosting WordPress in the cloud (e.g. AWS), then popular solutions use virtual private server (VPS) or container services. They often offer good performance, but at the price of configuration complexity and ongoing maintenance. More info below →
There is a better way…
I believe I can develop a way to host WordPress on AWS serverless that will address the shortcoming of current offerings:
- Faster than shared hosting.
- Cheaper than managed WordPress hosting, and in some scenarios even cheaper than shared hosting.
- More robust than dedicated servers.
- Better scalability than anything else.
- Easier than any other method to deploy WordPress to AWS.
I see this taking the form of a SaaS. Web designers log in to a website, do some simple WordPress and AWS configurations, and then publish to AWS. Easy-peasy! Pricing could follow a monthly or pay-as-you-go model.
There is much to figure out to make this work. But before I write a single piece of code, two questions need answering:
- Am I correct in my assuming that WordPress designers want the benefits of serverless AWS route?
- Would WordPress designers be willing to pay for the proposed service?
Please reach out to me at or comment below if you answer “yes” to these questions.
It’s quite complicated!
I manually configured proof of concept infrastructure for WordPress websites. I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of it all, but can tell you that making WordPress work in a serverless manner is no simple task. However, thanks to the concept of infrastructure as code (IaC), I am sure that I can build automation software that will do the heavy lifting in an efficient and repeatable way.
You may wonder about performance and cost? When I ran some speed tests, I was super pleased. And the monthly budget calculations also look great — I think one can host a typical WordPress website for less than US$1.00 per 10,000 page views. There is economy of scale — more websites and busier websites bring the unit cost down.
AWS and serverless WordPress hosting — prior art
I am not the first to think that AWS is an excellent way to host WordPress:
- YMIR does some things similar to what I have in mind. It seems an excellent service, but aimed at WordPress developers rather than WordPress designers. It uses a command line interface (CLI) tool to do its magic. You can read more about YMIR at ymirapp.com →
- Amazon LightSail takes some of the pain of configuring a VPS with a LAMP stack. But be prepared for more effort with WordPress updates and limited prospects to scale to a high-traffic site. Read more at aws.amazon.com →
- Bitnami does something similar with containers on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Read more at btinami.com →
- Using the AWS Fargate container service, you can go very far with scaling and speed. However, things get complex quickly — it’s not suitable for web developers that don’t want to get bogged down by DevOps. Read more at aws.amazon.com →
- There as several WordPress plugins that enable AWS S3 storage of assets and/or speed-up and caching via CDN (CloudFlare being a popular choice). But none offer you a complete serverless hosting environment.
- Some folks use the term “serverless WordPress” to describe a way to host static copies of WordPress websites. A more correct term would be “static site generation (SSR) for WordPress”. It’s great option for sites with truly static content, but not for sites with dynamic content such as eCommerce sites.