Projects on AWS: Build a WordPress Website

Deploy and host a production-ready WordPress website on AWS

In this project, you will learn how to deploy and host WordPress, an open-source blogging tool and content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. You will implement an architecture to host WordPress for a production workload with minimal management responsibilities required from you. To accomplish this, you will use AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Once you upload the WordPress files, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. Amazon RDS provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity, while managing time-consuming database administration tasks for you.

.. The total cost of building a WordPress website will vary depending on your usage and the instance types you select for the web server and database instance. Using the default configuration recommended in this guide, it will typically cost $450/month to host the WordPress site. This cost reflects the minimum resources recommended for a production ready WordPress workload, with only one active web server and a separate Amazon RDS MySQL database instance. The total cost may increase if you use Auto Scaling to increase the number of web server instances in the event of increased traffic to your WordPress site (approximately $75/month for each additional web server assuming that the web server is active for the entire month). To see a breakdown of the services used and their associated costs, see Services Used and Costs.

Delivery is not dependent on authentication

What really drives delivery, particularly at the consumer mailbox providers, is engagement.

The big drivers of engagement are

  1. having permission to send email and
  2. sending mail users want to receive and interact with.

Authentication is there so that the filtering engines know what mail is actually from you. It allows them to be really harsh on spam forging your domain or sent without your authority and still delivering your legitimate mail to the inbox. If your mail is fully authenticated and still going to the bulk folder, then the problem is related to your email. Something you’re doing, whether it’s a permission problem or an engagement problem or whatever, is making the filters think your mail isn’t wanted.

Fixing authentication isn’t going to fix delivery problems caused by authenticated email.

Domain reputation and deliverability

Unlike sending IPs that can be switched from time to time, your domain reputation sticks with you as a sender. This is why mailbox providers are investing in filtering protocols that put more weight on domain reputation to determine whether emails should make it through to the inbox.

If you’re not familiar with how your sending practices and domain reputation impact deliverability this webinar will get you up-to-speed with everything you need to know.