Better Wordpress Hosting with WellPress

I’ve developed a service for small companies and similar organizations that rely on WordPress for their portfolio websites or project presentations. These clients often lack the resources for a dedicated IT consultant but need advice beyond the standard offerings of consumer web hosting companies. I standardized server creation and configuration processes with a combination of half-automated runbooks (Ruby-based) that combine manual steps, programmatic calls to external APIs, Ansible playbook runs, and information integration with a specialized administrative application (Ruby on Rails-based). This application serves as the back office for invoicing and client communication, including status pages and hosting history.

The service is complemented by extensive monitoring, including external uptime sensing, scheduled checking, trace logging, and server and runtime metrics. This monitoring is based on Gatus, Healthchecks, Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana. Backups are incremental snapshots of the database and application file system, utilizing Restic and Autorestic.

The latest iteration added availability of container-based frontend applications, using the WordPress API as a backend. The service provides developer flexibility for environments, offering separate staging and production environments for the file system, database, and optional frontend application. Consultation with and implementation of deploy pipelines are also part of the service.