Major Infrastructure Upgrade Completed and Other News

Last night, Monday the 1st of September we completed a major infrastructure upgrade to the cloud services that provide the back-end for Wordfence. To give you an idea of what our cloud services provide:

• They provide a mirror of all WordPress themes, plugins and core files ever released that are in the official repository including SHA2 and MD5 hashes of those files.
• An archive of known good files and their hashes.
• A constantly updating list of known malware and their hashes.
• Known malware heuristics that we use to identify malware during a scan.
• A real-time mirror of the Google Safe Browsing list.
• Our Two Factor authentication system for paid customers.
• The API that checks if your web server’s IP is blacklisted with many real-time black listing services.
• Many other API functions that Wordfence uses during its day-to-day operation including IP Geolocation services.

Our growth during the past few months has been nothing short of spectacular. We’re proud to have such a fast growing user community and to have the support of both our paid priority customers and the free and open source WordPress community.

We have done our best to keep up, but at times we have had to scramble and the past two weeks has been one of those times.

So we decided to take our Labor Day long weekend and invest it in Wordfence along with making some investments in shiny new physical machines that we’ve racked in our data center.

We have now put some fresh powerful big iron in place to handle the large volume of API requests that our servers receive. The new system went live last night at 2AM Pacific Time as we brought the new front-end system online. After watching the graphs for a while I was cautiously optimistic about the performance that I was seeing. This morning, lets just say I’m in a very good mood today.

What we’re seeing is that our capacity for handling scans and Wordfence API calls has been increased by a factor of 100. We gauge this by looking at the load average, memory usage, disk usage, database query volume, disk IO wait times and several other important metrics that we monitor in real-time on our systems. It seems that rather than just getting a linear performance improvement from this upgrade, we have improved the architecture of the system as a whole and are seeing a much larger performance improvement than we anticipated.

The net result is that you can look forward to excellent performance and availability from our cloud services for the foreseeable future and we will continue to scale as our premium and free customers grow.

As a somewhat related announcement: We have added a new team member to keep our community driven forums up-to-date. Tim has joined us starting today and his username is “WFSupport” on the forums. Looking at some of his posts today he’s doing a great job. I will still be checking in from time to time and responding to selected posts and Tim will be escalating issues to Kerry and I.

Regards,

Mark Maunder – Wordfence Founder.