Enterprise WooCommerce Containerization & Migration: High-Performance Multi-Container Stack [MariaDB 10.11, Redis 7, PHP 8.2 Apache, WP-CLI]¶

Overview¶

This project documents the end-to-end containerization, optimization, and migration of an active, production-grade e-commerce storefront—Peeksleek, a luxury 100% Mulberry silk bedding brand—off legacy shared cPanel hosting (Namecheap) and onto a modern, isolated container architecture.

While cloud-hosted e-commerce sites frequently suffer from unpredictable performance degradation, silent database lockouts, and opaque server configurations, migrating an active WooCommerce installation requires addressing tight database-to-filesystem couplings, serialized metadata, dynamic URL bindings, and complex page-builder compilation caches.

The Problem: Shared cPanel Architecture Bottlenecks¶

Prior to migration, the live store ran on standard Namecheap shared cPanel hosting. Operating WooCommerce on shared hosting introduced critical infrastructure liabilities:

1. Table-Level Database Locking (MyISAM Storage Engine): Key WooCommerce tables were locked into MySQL MyISAM engine formats. Under concurrent traffic, write operations (e.g., cart updates, checkout sessions, inventory decrements) locked entire database tables, serializing incoming read requests and causing checkout timeouts.
2. Severe Memory & Concurrency Limits: PHP runtime memory was throttled to 128 MB with restrictive connection caps, leading to silent memory exhaustion during heavy page builder rendering and catalog queries.
3. Absence of Dedicated Object Caching: Without an in-memory caching daemon (Redis/Memcached), every visitor request forced repeated, expensive SQL round-trips to disk for transients, options, and cart metadata.
4. Configuration Drift & Opaque State: Modifications made via cPanel GUIs left no audit trail, making infrastructure version control and automated disaster recovery impossible.

The Target Architecture: High-Performance Docker Stack¶

To solve these constraints, I engineered an isolated, production-tuned multi-tier container stack:

• Relational Database Tier (peeksleek_db): MariaDB 10.11 with a dedicated 4 GB InnoDB buffer pool (--innodb_buffer_pool_size=4G), multi-core threading (max_connections=300), 512 MB log file sizes, and UTF-8 MB4 multilingual support. All tables operate with ACID-compliant, lock-free row-level concurrency.
• In-Memory Caching Tier (peeksleek_redis): Redis 7 on Alpine Linux allocated with a dedicated 1 GB RAM cache (--maxmemory 1024mb), allkeys-lru eviction policy, and append-only persistence (--appendonly yes) for sub-millisecond object cache resolution.
• Application Runtime Tier (peeksleek_app): Hardened WordPress container on PHP 8.2 Apache, paired with a custom Zend OPcache configuration, 1024 MB script memory allocation, and declarative reverse-proxy host resolution.
• Automated Bootstrap Layer: 1-command startup orchestration that extracts assets, mounts the database dump, reconciles table prefixes, executes domain search-replace, and recompiles Elementor CSS templates without manual intervention.

Runbook Structure¶