Hosting the tools on an existing website and/or have an existing hosting partner? The following info will help ensure a successful deployment.
Important: This platform is not suitable for commodity web hosts (i.e. the cheap plans from GoDaddy or Bluehost). Eventually there will be hundreds of thousands of posts and tens of thousands of taxonomy terms in the system. As a general rule, if you don’t have direct control of server configuration (i.e. memory allocation to PHP processes) then that environment is unlikely to be suitable for this workload.
Minimum Server Specifications
- Apache/2.4.39 or newer (or equivalent LiteSpeed server) on Linux with mpm-worker multiprocess module
- PHP 7.4+ with PHP-FPM
- Minimum 4GB and up to 8GB RAM allocatable to each PHP process
- Most page requests do not require anywhere near this much memory, but it is required for some larger background processes and data export tools.
- Minimum 250 second PHP request timeout
- Up to 5GB of disk space
Security Requirements
Other Requirements
- A maintenance and update plan for WordPress core and any plugins that are not part of the WE Data Tools platform is required. There is a strong correlation between site hacks and unmaintained WordPress environments.
- Our team requires WordPress Administrator access so that we can manage and configure our plugins.
- We will limit our activities to administrative work that relates directly to our plugins, and will not make any changes to other parts the system.
- We will need to occasionally refresh Permalinks in Settings > Permalinks. No modifications will be made to this screen, but pressing “Save” will regenerate Apache’s rewrite rules for .htaccess. This is required as we add new post types, taxonomies, etc in new releases of the software.
- Any other changes to WordPress configuration or with unrelated components will always be coordinated with hosting provider.
- Our publishing/deployment workflow requires FTP access to the website.
- We will add several template files to the active theme.These templates are there to support our custom post types, taxonomies, and tool pages.
- We will not modify any existing templates in the theme.
- We use standard WordPress get_header() and get_footer() functions to display the theme’s header and footer. If the theme uses a non-standard approach for this, we may require direction and assistance to make the necessary modifications to our templates.
- Our configuration system requires that we add several PHP constants to the wp-config.php file. We will not modify any existing data in this file – our activities will be append-only to the top of the file. If we have access to this file, we’ll modify it ourselves, otherwise we’ll send the hosting team the appropriate items to add.
Scope & Assumptions
- The hosting provider is responsible for general application availability, security (WP Core, unrelated plugins), all backups and disaster recovery.
- In the event of a problem, we’ll always do our best to work with the hosting provider to diagnose and troubleshoot the issue. However we may, at our discretion, deem the hosting environment unsuitable for the application if we end up with a show-stopper issue that can’t be resolved suitably within the context of each organization’s support policies.