Introducing Dedicated Dev Environments

Any respectable band will not perform live without a proper soundcheck. That’s because, without a soundcheck, a live concert could be a logistical and technical disaster. At WP Engine, we are introducing Dedicated Dev Environments, or website “soundchecks”- a safe way to test everything out before the live show.

Dedicated WordPress hosting is a plan that involves the use of one server and is common among enterprise-grade websites, including corporations and e-commerce storefronts. In addition to scalability, a dedicated environment helps provide additional layers of security, reliability, and flexibility. The WP Engine Digital Experience Platform offers dedicated environments for customers on our Custom plan; dedicated environments don’t share processing power, memory, disk space or other system resources.

Dedicated Development Environments (DDE) are a tool that allows customers to seamlessly separate their development and staging experiences to isolated hardware on our platform. DDE enables all of this to happen as part of a normal workflow without support intervention. Using DDE, customers can purchase one or two additional environments. These can house either both Staging and Development installs (one Server) or separate servers for each Development and Staging (two Servers).

Main Benefits

The use of dedicated development environments is largely dependent on individual need but DDEs have some common use cases including isolation, unaligned software versions, load testing, pentesting and more.

Isolated Testing

With a DDE, destructive testing can happen without compromising any production sites. Load tests can scale to total system failure without a live site being taken down, and pentests can completely eliminate firewall rules without risking the health of the production environment.

Separate Software Versions

Using DDEs, customers can seamlessly move their environments between a production server running older software and their development server with newer software versions. This allows the added flexibility of having development and staging environments live on servers with different software versions. This is especially prevalent for people who are cautious about migrating important sites to a new version of PHP.

Like For Load Testing

DDEs gives users the freedom to have two separate environments they control and can copy between freely. This gives users the ability to execute load tests and penetration testing with little to no obstacles. This can help add expediency and uptime to users looking to do active development without losing downtime on production.

Learn More

WP Engine customers already on plans with a dedicated server are eligible for Dedicated Dev Environments. Visit this page for more information on Dedicated Dev Environments or for guidance on how to get started using them.