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Are you tired of paying for what seems to be overpriced hosting for WordPress, or do you want to have full control of your WordPress environment. This article will get you started thinking about the possibility of self hosting.
How to Install WordPress on a Web Server?
WordPress comes in two flavors, available from two different websites.
WordPress.com is home to the fully hosted version of WordPress, and that's the version you want to choose if you would like to create a website without any knowledge in a matter of minutes and working on producing compelling content instead of worrying about technicalities.
WordPress.org is home to the self-hosted version of WordPress, and it requires users to supply their own hosting and do their own backups and maintenance. This is the version you want to choose if you want to manage WordPress either for yourself or your clients.
How to Ensure Highly Available Site?
To ensure high availability of a self-hosted WordPress site, it's necessary to harden the WordPress installation from attacks by always using the latest version of WordPress, avoiding vulnerable third-party themes and plugins, adhering to basic online security practices, and following the recommendations published by WordPress developers.
To protect against traffic overloads caused either by too many visitors trying to enter the site at the same time or malicious Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, it's highly advisable to employ the services of a content delivery network provider such as Cloudflare.
How to Scale When Your Site Gets Popular?
Another advantage of Cloudflare and other content delivery network providers is the fact that their global networks of powerful data centers spanning across all continents enable virtually unlimited scaling of self-hosted WordPress sites.
Of course, content delivery networks don't replace the fundamental principles of scaling small WordPress sites with pageviews in the hundreds to millions of pageviews every month. Such principles include reverse proxy page caching, database distribution, search indexing, or building an elastic architecture, just to name a few.
WordPress may be the content management system of choice for many independent bloggers, but that doesn't mean that it can't scale to support enterprise-class applications. Sites such as TechCrunch, The New Yorker, BBC America, Sony Music, The White House, Dyn, or Toyota all use WordPress and benefit from its mature features and excellent versatility.
Where to Find More Information?
The WordPress Codex is the most comprehensive living repository for WordPress information and documentation on the web, and it's maintained by core WordPress developers. It contains everything you need to know about WordPress as a content management system, teaches how to work with themes and create plugins, and lists links to developer documentation and WordPress APIs, among other things.
