Maximize Your Site's Performance by Choosing Your Primary Data Center

Daniel Bachhuber

Dec 16

Do you want even more control over how your site is hosted? We're excited to add a new feature to our hosting toolbox: you can now choose your primary data center when enabling hosting features on your WordPress.com Business site.

While all sites on WordPress.com benefit from high-frequency CPUs, automatic data center failover, and worry-free burst scaling, selecting your primary data center gives you the ability to keep your content closer to your audience.

Choose Your Primary Data Center

By default, all WordPress.com sites are added to the optimal data center. If your audience is primarily in a specific region, you can maximize performance by picking the data center in that region.

To select a primary data center, click on "Choose a data center instead" when visiting Settings > Hosting Configuration and activating hosting features. Once you do so, you'll be able to select your preferred primary data center.

WordPress.com has four primary data centers to choose from — with more on the way: US West, US Central, US East, EU West. We also operate over 20 secondary data centers across six continents. Our platform automatically stores and serves your content from the closest server to your users. By selecting a primary data center, you can shorten the distance your content has to travel.

Our Data Center Secret Sauce

Many hosting providers resell existing solutions built for hosting a variety of web applications. We built our hosting for WordPress, and running our own data centers is the "secret sauce" that makes our sites so fast.

The key ingredients to our secret sauce:

High-Frequency CPUs. We use high-frequency CPUs to process WordPress and WooCommerce-specific queries at incredible speeds. Other hosts use lower performance CPUs and charge extra for better CPUs, if they're even available.

Automatic Data Center Failover. In addition to backups, every WordPress.com site is replicated in real-time to a second data center in a different region. Under the hood, we use ZFS to provide snapshots and also block-based replication. This unique, geo-redundant architecture helps ensure your site operates with maximum uptime.

Worry-Free Burst Scaling. WordPress.com runs an in-house PHP build that integrates with our resource management tools and monitoring. It even allows for configurations to be changed dynamically on a per-request basis. Any WordPress.com site can instantly scale to over 100 PHP workers if the need arises.

Custom data centers are just one of the many reasons why WordPress.com is the best managed WordPress hosting on the planet.

Host Your Next Site on WordPress.com

Building on our multi-site management and SSH access, the primary data center picker is yet another reason to host on WordPress.com. Our goal is to make WordPress.com an enjoyable, indispensable part of your workflow.

What other features would you like to see available? How could we make WordPress.com an even more powerful place to build a website? Feel free to leave a comment or contact our friendly support.

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