DevOps Services
Stabilizing a Shared Multi-Site WordPress Infrastructure
Diagnosed and resolved cascading reliability issues across 8 co-hosted WordPress sites sharing a single EC2 instance.
01
The Challenge
Eight WordPress landing pages for different geographic markets were co-hosted on a single t3a.medium EC2 instance. The sites were experiencing PHP-FPM worker exhaustion, visitors were occasionally logged into the wrong site due to shared authentication cookies, and DNS resolution was inconsistently routing internal traffic.
02
The Approach
1
Traced PHP-FPM worker exhaustion to a specific plugin making blocking outbound HTTP calls that tied up workers under load.
2
Identified that co-hosted WordPress installs were sharing identical authentication salts, causing session cookie collisions between separate sites on the same domain family.
3
Diagnosed a split-horizon DNS conflict where an internal Active Directory domain was shadowing public DNS records, causing inconsistent resolution.
4
Standardized nginx configuration across the fleet for Next.js and WordPress subdirectory routing to run consistently on shared infrastructure.
03
The Outcome
Cross-site session conflicts were eliminated by differentiating authentication salts per site, PHP-FPM stability was restored by addressing the blocking plugin behavior, and DNS resolution was corrected — all without needing to split the sites onto separate infrastructure.
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