Most people start with everything on one VPS: WordPress, MySQL, Nginx or Apache, and the application code all running on the same virtual server. For small sites with light traffic, that’s fine. But as your site grows, keeping everything on one server creates problems.
Why splitting helps performance
WordPress (and most web applications) is CPU-heavy: processing PHP, rendering pages, running plugins. MySQL is RAM-heavy: caching query results, holding indexes in memory, managing connections. When they share a server, they compete for the same resources. A traffic spike hits your web server hard, which eats into the RAM that MySQL needs for query caching, which makes database queries slower, which makes page loads even slower. It’s a downward spiral.
On separate virtual servers, you size each one for its job. Give the web server more CPU and less RAM. Give the database server more RAM and less CPU. Each one runs at its optimal configuration instead of fighting over shared resources.
Security benefits
When your database runs on a separate VPS, you can lock it down so it only accepts connections from your web server’s private IP address. It doesn’t need a public IP at all. That means even if someone compromises your web server, the database isn’t directly accessible from the internet.
Use our private networking to connect your virtual servers within the same data center. Traffic between them stays on a private network with no exposure to the public internet.
Scaling independently
With a split architecture, scaling is straightforward. If your web server is the bottleneck, add another Linux VPS running WordPress and put a load balancer in front. Both web servers point to the same database server. If the database is the bottleneck, upgrade that VPS to a larger plan with more RAM, or migrate it to a dedicated server for maximum performance.
You can’t do this easily when everything is on one server. Scaling means replacing the whole machine with a bigger one, which involves migration and downtime.
How to set it up
Deploy two virtual servers in the same data center. Install your web application (WordPress, Joomla, a custom app) on one. Install MySQL or PostgreSQL on the other. In your application’s config file, point the database connection to the database server’s private IP instead of localhost. Enable private networking on both servers from the Client Portal.
Our platform automatically places your virtual servers on different hypervisors when possible, so a single hardware failure doesn’t take down both your web server and your database at the same time.
If you need help designing this kind of architecture for your VPS hosting setup, contact our team. We’ve helped plenty of customers move from single-server to multi-server setups.