8am Media
A server migration and performance overhaul for a multilingual WordPress news publisher: three hosting accounts and about 150 GB moved to a modern, hardened, cached stack.
The challenge
8am Media publishes news in Persian, English, Pashto and Uzbek on WordPress, and its sites were running on an end-of-life CentOS 7 server with an outdated PHP and database setup. For a newsroom that breaks stories under heavy traffic and attracts constant attacks, the old server was a speed bottleneck and a security risk.
What we did
We migrated three hosting accounts, about 150 GB of sites, media and databases, to a new server with twice the CPU cores and memory on NVMe storage, then rebuilt the stack for speed: nginx in front of Apache with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, PHP 8.4 with OPcache, a tuned MariaDB 11.4, a Redis object cache for every site, and CDN page caching. Security was hardened with a firewall, a web application firewall with WordPress-aware rules, malware scanning and spam filtering, and we set up automatic updates, monitoring, log rotation and off-site backups.
The result
The cutover was completed in a planned window, and every language edition now runs on a modern, cached and hardened stack, and the firewall blocks thousands of malicious requests every day before they reach WordPress.
Scope of work
Server migration (3 accounts, ~150 GB)
nginx + Apache, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3
PHP 8.4 FPM & OPcache tuning
MariaDB 11.4 tuning
Redis object cache & CDN caching
Firewall & WAF hardening
Malware scanning & spam filtering
Monitoring & off-site backups
A closer look
The sections we designed and built — tap any image to view full size.
Want results like this?
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