Multiple WP installs & security

  • Hi All,

    Any advise here would be much appreciated. The scenario I’m looking at is an on-prem hosting of multiple (possibly several dozen) WordPress instances each of which would be entirely separate sites with different administrators. Many of these admins would have limited technical skills and/or experience with WP upgrades, security etc. and could not necessarily be trusted to do their updates, manage their plugins, harden their installs… Multi-site not at option because of this.

    Is there any way to achieve enough isolation from a security perspective on shared architecture (e.g one web front end server, one database server) or would the common ground of the web server user mean this could only be done with one set of servers per install? Thanks.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    You can put all the databases on one MySQL/Maria server but be sure each WP site uses different credentials. When setting up the virtual hosts for your web server, set PHP to run under a different user ID for each site using php-fpm (instead of mod_php). That should provide the necessary isolation.

    If you want to manage updates, etc yourself (rather than allowing the site admins to do it), look at using MainWP — it gives you a nice management console and is free. https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/mainwp

    Thread Starter mfogarty

    (@mfogarty)

    Thanks, Steven, I’ll have a look into that. If I could ask, would you recommend one database per WP instance rather than a shared Db with individual tables?

    Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    One database per WP instance. That’s how I set up my server. It’s helpful if you’re careful about naming things, like using the site name for your config files and database name. ??

    Thread Starter mfogarty

    (@mfogarty)

    Great, thanks so much for the advise!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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