Carbon60 Networks’ enterprise WordPress platform delivers content fast and reliably, making your site highly resilient to both welcome traffic spikes and unwelcome denial-of-service attacks. Carbon60 provides a white glove level of service to support the entire WordPress development and delivery life-cycle, hosted within Canadian data centres.

Their WordPress sandbox allows you to create new WordPress development environments on-demand while an integrated code management service provides a secure place to manage code changes. Sites are then staged for testing using Carbon60’s integrated security and performance testing tools. Once optimized, site code and content are promoted to the production WordPress delivery platform. This platform combines the strengths of an enterprise cloud computing architecture – optimized to host WordPress source code, plug-ins and content – with a vastly scalable and robust global edge content delivery/security system which guarantees your site is secure and delivers high performance to you viewers.

Why WordPress?

1. WordPress democratizes the web, meaning there’s no need for bloated web departments on staff. Personnel have direct access to easily publish their content. Our clients use WP because of the low barrier to entry, and the large community surrounding it.

2. WordPress plugins & themes create a diverse landscape so not all wordpress sites look and act the same, and can allow for rapid development without having to re-invent the wheel.

Do you have an interesting WordPress story?

While WordPress does democratize the web, sometimes you just need to ask for help!

We have a client who has an ecommerce site which sells thousands of different products. Their navigation menu includes every single item they sell. In addition to this, the site is multilingual, so each nav tree needs to be drawn twice.

A single page load called the DB approximately 35000 times, each load. The webserver load however, remained minimal.

We were able to aggressively cache these db calls, and are working with the client to enforce some content rules to bring down the amount of calls to the database in their navigation. Additionally, we are looking to separate and generate the menu system to be used as an include going forward.

At Carbon60 we are not just interested in publishing your content. We want it to be fast, and stable.

How has WordPress affected your business?

Because Carbon60 Networks is focussed on enterprise requirements, our environments are more secure than some other hosting environments. Typically we do not allow clients access to production environments without permission. This means that supporting WordPress falls on our support department. Users enjoy the convenience of the one-click upgrade, and this is the type of service we strive to provide (though stability and security are top of mind – in the event that the one-click upgrade goes badly, we are present to roll back the change and investigate what went wrong.)

From a hosting/support perspective, WordPress allows us to have a familiarity amongst all sites and this allows us to provide reliable, scalable, support procedures, and lets us implement proven best-practises for securing and maintaining our clients’ sites.

What’s your advice to WordCamp attendees?

Adding a CDN to your existing site is a great way to speed it up, and keep it up during brief outages.

Porting your enterprise site to a clustered hosting environment is a fantastic way to maintain uptime, and luckily WordPress helps us with the heavy lifting – Sessions are stored externally in cookies and the database so the webservers don’t need much configuration to scale horizontally.

Thank you, Carbon60, for supporting WordCamp Toronto 2014!