
Failover vs. High Availability: Understanding WP Engine’s Mission-Critical Solutions
Downtime comes with a hefty price tag. For businesses that rely on their websites, even a few minutes of unexpected outage can translate into significant losses. In fact, over half the respondents to the Uptime Institute’s 2024 annual survey indicated “their most recent significant, serious or severe outage cost more than $100,000, with one in five saying that their most recent outage cost more than $1 million.”
These staggering figures underscore a critical truth: when disaster strikes, your website must remain operational. This is precisely why WP Engine built Failover, our new, enterprise-grade disaster recovery solution.
While WP Engine has long offered robust high-availability plans designed to eliminate single points of failure through customized AWS cluster configurations, WP Engine Failover addresses a distinct yet equally vital need: a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan in the face of widespread data center outages.
With WP Engine Failover, your business stays online—even in the face of critical infrastructure failures. Seamless continuity, with no lost data and no customer interruptions.
High availability vs. Failover
When it comes to ensuring your website’s continuous operation, terms like “high availability” and “disaster recovery” are often used interchangeably, but they address fundamentally different challenges. WP Engine’s high-availability plans provide a significant degree of redundancy.
With the introduction of WP Engine Failover, it’s crucial to understand how these two powerful solutions work and, more importantly, how they complement each other to offer unparalleled uptime and business continuity.
High-availability plans: Mitigating single points of failure
WP Engine’s High Availability Plans are designed with a core principle in mind: eliminating the customer’s web server as a single point of failure. These plans utilize a customized AWS Cluster configuration, meaning your site is served from multiple web servers distributed across different availability zones.
This provides maximum uptime by ensuring that if one server experiences an issue, others can take over. While this offers a degree of redundancy and significantly boosts uptime, it’s primarily focused on internal server health and localized component failures. It’s a proactive measure against common operational glitches and hardware issues.

WP Engine Failover: Comprehensive disaster recovery
WP Engine Failover, on the other hand, is a game-changer for true disaster recovery and business continuity. While high-availability plans protect against individual server failures, failover is engineered to safeguard your site against much broader, more catastrophic events. Specifically, when an entire data center loses connectivity to the outside world due to human error, natural disasters, or other circumstances.
Failover automatically moves your site to a working data center in the event of a disaster at its primary data center. The key difference between high availability and failover lies in failover’s ability to handle data center outages.
Failover involves a redundant server located in a different zone from the primary server, poised to seamlessly support incoming traffic. Crucially, it writes data to what is called a “regional disk,” which means there is no data loss in the event of an outage. This real-time disk sync ensures that when a failover event occurs, your site comes back up with all the latest data, ensuring continuous operations even in the most challenging scenarios.
In essence, while high availability plans ensure your site remains resilient against internal server issues, failover acts as your ultimate insurance policy, guaranteeing that your business stays online even when the unexpected impacts an entire data center.

Beyond traditional backups
An “always-on” presence is a fundamental requirement for doing business digitally, yet many businesses still rely on incomplete strategies for facing the threat of downtime.
While conventional backup solutions are undoubtedly important, they may fall short when it comes to true business continuity and disaster recovery.
Why traditional solutions don’t offer full coverage
There are a number of key issues that traditional backup methods simply don’t address:
- Complex disaster recovery setups: For businesses attempting to “DIY” their failover solutions, the reality is a significant investment in extensive infrastructure, intricate monitoring systems, and ongoing, laborious management. This diverts valuable internal resources and expertise away from core business objectives.
- Slow recovery times: Traditional disaster recovery often involves a lengthy process. For an eCommerce site, a financial platform, or a media outlet, every minute of downtime can mean hundreds, thousands, or even millions of dollars in lost revenue and irreversible damage to customer trust.
- Risk of data loss: While backups store historical data, they don’t prevent real-time data loss during an active outage. The period between the last backup and the moment of disruption can lead to irretrievable transactional data, customer information, or content updates, creating significant compliance and operational headaches.
- Challenges in meeting compliance and vendor requirements: Increasingly, industries like finance, healthcare, and eCommerce are subject to stringent regulatory and security mandates that demand robust redundancy solutions. Traditional, reactive backup plans rarely suffice to meet these demanding compliance obligations.
Failover as a true disaster recovery solution
This is precisely where WP Engine Failover steps in, moving beyond the limitations of mere data restoration to offer proactive business continuity. Failover solutions are essential for disaster recovery scenarios in which an entire data center loses connection
WP Engine Failover doesn’t just help you restore lost data after a disaster; it prevents data loss and ensures that your site remains operational during the event. By automatically rerouting traffic to a new server in an unaffected zone, it ensures your “digital open sign” never turns off. This means continuous operations, uninterrupted customer experiences, and the peace of mind that your business can weather even the most severe connectivity issues.
Traditional site recovery is a matter of picking up the pieces. Failover ensures the pieces are never dropped in the first place.
How WP Engine Failover works: Key features and benefits
Failover isn’t just a safety net. It’s a meticulously engineered solution designed for organizations where every second of uptime counts. Built on the foundation of WP Engine’s Azure infrastructure, it offers a suite of features that collectively ensure unparalleled uptime confidence and comprehensive downtime mitigation.
Intelligent automation is the cornerstone of Failover. If your primary data center goes offline, traffic is automatically rerouted to a backup with virtually no manual intervention required.
This automated traffic transfer ensures minimal disruption to your users and operations. With an estimated Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of just 7 minutes, Failover offers near-instant recovery, drastically reducing the period your site might be offline compared to traditional disaster recovery methods that can take hours or even days.
Zero data loss
One of the most critical aspects of disaster recovery is preventing data loss. Failover achieves a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero, meaning absolutely no data is lost during a failover event. This is accomplished through a sophisticated mechanism where all disk data, including your SQL database, is replicated in real-time to a “regional disk” located in a different zone.
There’s no separate database service to sync. Rather, the disk data itself is continuously mirrored. When a failover event occurs, the primary server’s database container is gracefully shut down, and a new one is brought up in the second zone, instantly accessing all the latest, real-time synced data. This ensures every transaction, every content update, and every piece of customer data is protected and restored.
Multi-zonal redundancy
WP Engine Failover leverages multi-zonal redundancy to protect your site against localized failures and even large-scale natural disasters. By storing your site data securely across multiple physical locations within the same Azure region, Failover creates a robust defense mechanism.
If one zone experiences a catastrophic event, the redundant server in another zone is already prepared to take over. This architecture provides an invaluable layer of protection, safeguarding your digital assets even when a broad area is affected.
Focus on what matters most
Unlike complex DIY disaster recovery solutions that demand extensive infrastructure, constant monitoring, and ongoing manual intervention, WP Engine Failover is a fully managed, automated solution. Our expert team handles the entire failover process automatically, from detection to activation, allowing you to sidestep the complexities of disaster recovery planning and execution.
This hands-free management translates directly into peace of mind. Businesses can dedicate their time, resources, and focus to growth, innovation, and customer service rather than getting bogged down by intricate contingency plans or reacting to unexpected outages.
Uptime confidence, downtime mitigation
Ultimately, the combination of automated failover, 0 RPO, multi-zonal redundancy, and hands-free management culminates in unparalleled uptime confidence. You gain the assurance that your mission-critical website will remain operational even in the face of disasters outside your control.
With Failover, WP Engine empowers businesses to mitigate the financial and reputational damage of downtime, ensuring continuous operations and a consistently positive digital experience for your audience.
Why Failover is essential for your business
WP Engine Failover isn’t just another product; it’s a strategic necessity for businesses that cannot afford to compromise on their digital availability. Beyond the direct financial cost, downtime can negatively impact customer trust and brand reputation.
An unreliable website erodes confidence, drives customers to competitors, and can tarnish a brand’s image for years. Failover directly addresses this by ensuring continuous operations, safeguarding your revenue streams, and preserving your brand’s integrity even in the face of adversity.
When every second counts
WP Engine Failover is purpose-built for mission-critical industries where continuous uptime is not just preferred, but absolutely vital:
- eCommerce: Maintaining an eCommerce site is crucial for growth and customer satisfaction. Even in the face of challenges, Failover ensures eCommerce operations can continue seamlessly, guaranteeing business as usual by protecting sales, preventing cart abandonment, and maintaining customer loyalty.
- Finance: Financial institutions require uninterrupted service for transactions, data integrity, and regulatory compliance. Any downtime can lead to massive financial losses and severe regulatory penalties.
- Healthcare: Patient portals, health records, and critical applications demand constant availability for patient care, compliance, data security, and operational efficiency. Downtime in healthcare can have life-threatening consequences.
- Media: News outlets and content platforms need to deliver real-time updates and maintain audience engagement without interruption. In a fast-paced news cycle, even minutes of downtime can mean losing a competitive edge and audience trust.
By providing reliability to maintain seamless operations and confidence online even in critical situations, WP Engine Failover ensures your digital experiences are always available and secure, protecting your business from the unforeseen.
Conclusion
Outages happen, but they don’t have to cause extended downtime, erode customer trust, or disrupt your business continuity. When you’re running a digital experience where every second counts, WP Engine Failover is your ultimate insurance policy.
WP Engine Failover is currently available for Core and Enterprise plans, specifically for sites hosted on Azure data centers. If you’re an existing customer using an Azure environment, we can assist you with a straightforward migration to take advantage of Failover. New customers signing up for these plans can start with Failover already in place.
Want to learn more about how WP Engine Failover can enhance your website’s uptime, performance, and resilience? Connect with a representative today to discuss your specific needs and take the first step towards worry-free digital operations.