Context

A prominent educational institution faced two distinct challenges. Their critical internal services including core application databases and staff management systems ran on standalone physical servers with a high risk of failure. Simultaneously, their public-facing WordPress website, hosted on an external shared plan, suffered from slow load times and a poor user experience.

The Challenge

My mission was to engineer a fully resilient, highly available infrastructure for all internal services to eliminate downtime. In parallel, I needed to drastically improve the performance and responsiveness of the public website on its existing shared hosting, proving that significant gains could be achieved through expert optimization without a costly migration.

My Solution & Actions

• Internal Infrastructure Overhaul: Designed and deployed a Windows Server Failover Cluster using Hyper-V, consolidating physical servers into a robust virtual environment with automatic failover.
• Robust Data Protection: Implemented Veeam Backup & Replication to create a reliable, automated disaster recovery plan for the entire virtual infrastructure.
• Web Performance Optimization: Conducted a deep analysis of the WordPress site to identify and resolve bottlenecks in the theme, plugins, and database.
• CDN & Security Integration: Leveraged Cloudflare’s CDN to accelerate content delivery globally and its WAF to enhance website security against common threats.
• On-Site Enhancements: Implemented multi-layer caching, minified CSS/JavaScript, and optimized images to significantly reduce the site’s size and complexity.

The Result

This dual-focus project achieved comprehensive success. The new HA cluster completely eliminated unplanned downtime for all critical internal services. The website optimization efforts led to a dramatic increase in site speed and responsiveness, cutting page load times by over 50% and enhancing the organization’s public digital presence all while leveraging the existing hosting investment.

Project Architecture: Before & After

       ( The Internet )
|
|--------> [ External Shared Hosting ]
|               (Slow WordPress Site)
|
[ MikroTik Firewall/Router ]
|
---[ Main Switch ]---
|                    |
[= Phys. Server 1 =]      [= Phys. Server 2 =]
(LOB Apps)                  (Core Database)
*Single Point of          *Single Point of
Failure*                      Failure*

       ( The Internet )
|
+----------+-----------+
|                       |
[ Cloudflare ]            [ MikroTik Firewall/Router ]
(CDN / WAF)                                     |
|                                              |
v                                     ---[ Main Switch ]---
[ Ext. Hosting ]                          /              /\
(FAST Site)                           [= Veeam =]    [ HA Cluster ]
(Backs up VMs) (VMs: Apps, DB)
*No Downtime*