Learn How

Have you ever wanted to easily back up your data on WordPress, keep your content safe? Or are you concerned about your data security, or want an easy way to keep your database secure? Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed solution that can solve these common concerns, and a whole lot more.

What is WordPress

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) most commonly used to publish blogs and articles, but can also be used to create community forums, e-commerce sites as well. It is important first to understand how WordPress is structured before we can take it apart.

The framework is written in PHP, a popular programming language on the web for performing back-end jobs. PHP files contain the markup, styling, and logic used to create your site (though they can be in separate files and imported with PHP). These make up your static pages. The static pages provide the skeleton for all the content on your site.

Why RDS?

All of your content is stored by WordPress using MySQL. Examples would be all your blog posts, comments, user accounts, products, and orders. By default, WordPress installs and uses a MySQL database on the same server. A few reasons why you may not want your database on the same server as your WordPress installation:

• You are on your own for database maintenance; you must perform your own security updates and backups.
• Your site’s performance may be hurt by WordPress and MySQL competing for resources.
• If your site becomes more popular, you are unable to horizontally scale by adding more server instances.

We will be looking at how to set up and configure a WordPress site with a fast, secure and reliable database with out requiring specialized database knowledge. Traditionally database maintenance could be difficult, sometimes even requiring specialized administrators. Setting up our WordPress site we want to be able to stay concentrated on content creation. Technical difficulties are extremely frustrating, so we will be automating our database security, backups and performance checks.

Our site will be hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to install WordPress and store our static files and Amazon RDS for MySQL to store our data. In Part Two, I will be going over in detail how to manage your Amazon RDS deploy.