CampusPress: WordPress For Education Gets Bigger And Better

The WPMU DEV team is also behind CampusPress, which provides WordPress hosting and services for schools, school districts, and universities.

For over a decade, we’ve managed some of the largest and highest traffic WordPress Multisite networks in the world, including Edublogs, Global2, and Sites at Penn State.

All in, we’re talking over 10 million sites across more than a thousand Multisite installs. Nothing to shake a stick at!

Over the past few years, our focus has been on continuing to be the leader in hosting large-scale Multisite networks, while also improving our handling of high-traffic and high-level websites. For example, in the last year, we’ve brought online sites like TheLantern.com student newspaper of Ohio State University, the district and school websites for Round Rock ISD, and main sites for Providence College. All with a focus on performance, accessibility, and ease of use.

One knock on our service that we’ve heard over the years is that we are too rigid. In order to keep our customers’ sites running smoothly, we have been limited in the plugins and themes that we allow, and for those with custom projects, we haven’t always been the most developer-friendly platform. We agree, and we heard you!

Introducing Dedicated Clusters

Part of our ongoing improvements included moving all customers over to a new environment within Amazon Web Services. I gave details on this move, and our infrastructure setup, in a post here on this blog last year.

But we still kept much of what we do basically the same. Using docker containers, customers are logically separated from each other, but they still share AWS web (EC2) and database (Aurora) resources. We keep WordPress core and all plugins and themes on a shared and common code base, meaning updates for all customers happen all at the same time. And we keep a pretty tight ship when it comes to introducing new plugins or themes to the environment.

For those customers that require a little more freedom and a little more direct access, we now offer a private and dedicated AWS cluster, tailored specifically to the type of sites being hosted. Our goal here is to provide even better performance and significantly increased flexibility while maintaining our high standards of security and reliability. Learn more about our new dedicated clusters and the benefits that come with them here.

Free Six Month Pilot!

We’ve got big plans for the coming months and beyond. We’ve started rolling out a new CDN service for all customers which is proving to decrease page load speed considerably. We also benefit from all of the new releases and projects from the WPMU DEV roadmap. The improved CoursePress LMS and brand new Forminator plugins are particularly exciting for us.

And for the month of February, we are offering a completely free, no obligation, six month pilot to schools and universities interested in our services. This offer has expired.