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Server management services like Runcloud, Ploi, ServerPilot, etc.


elabx
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Hi everyone! This services have popped around in conversations around the forum and wanted to give it its own topic to share some experiences with these services. 

I have personally used Runcloud and I am happy with it, specially with their support which is most of the time really fast. But feature wise Ploi seems to be really far ahead features wise and I really wish for a lot of their stuff like load balancer, the backup system, db servers, etc. 

 

 

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ServerPilot is a cool service and deserve a word here. I know this service because of @Macrura and I never get out. Thanks dude !

You buy a dedicated server, attach it to ServerPilot and you get your server up in minutes, he will get updated without any intervention. You will get the right stuff, updated with every last software and dependencies version, patched, without "any" security hole. I even some at the start tried to hack the server with no luck, I had to make a vulnerability myself to get into ? no really you get all needed architecture, like app isolation and more with security in mind. 

And if you know what your are doing, you can install any software you want, do any ninja command or add any config through SSH. 

You will also like their support lol, full of experienced geeks veterans. 

That's all, this was my 10$ spam for today ? 

 

 

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2 hours ago, flydev ?? said:

You will also like their support lol, full of experienced geeks veterans. 

This is really nice to know!

I actually have a ServerPilot account from when they had their free tier, quite a few years ago and it's still running my first pet project with ProcessWire, getting 100k-200k sessions a month on a 5USD Vultr VPS. 

 

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If one day you want to play with dedicated server, you can try to get one from kimsufi, they start at less than 5€ ? but you need to stay a long night refreshing the browser or code a bot to get the server, there are hard concurrence on this at this price.

The last thing I made for example it's a server to host a live support chat service (https://github.com/LiveHelperChat?

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Hard to give a comparison because I've not used the other services but we switched to Cloudways about 18 months ago and they've worked well for us ( much faster than the previous hosting company we used).

You get to pick server providers with no need to separate accounts with them so all the billing is in the same place. The control panel does pretty much everything we need to and you can let clients have access to their server if you trust them.

We've not had to contact support for anything serious but when we have spoken to them they were responsive and seem to know what they're doing.

I suspect most of my Christmas holiday is going to be spent shifting sites from our old provider over to them...

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Just had a situation where one of Runcloud utils came in handy, I was able to block a rain of requests coming looking for WordPress stuff with their per-applicatinon Firewall/ModSecurity settings. As someone who isn't really knowledgeable on htaccess or firewall settings, it came in super handy to save face with the client.

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We've switched most of our servers to a setup of Hetzner VPS managed via Ploi. I haven't found many differences between Cloudways, ServerPilot, Moss, Ploi, etc. if all you're doing is hosting simple Laravel or ProcessWire sites.

The main advantage seems to be speed here — compared to shared hosting, the sites are between 4 to 10 times faster even when hosted on the cheapest Hetzner instance at 3$/month and with security and updates taken care by Ploi. We liked Ploi because it's great at regular backups, has lots of notification channels for automatic deploys and the admin panel is very polished.

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I've been using RunCloud for a couple of years now, both at work and for my own/clients use.

I originally wanted to go with Ploi, but unfortunately the features I needed just weren't ready at the time, so have stuck with RunCloud. I'm also invested in using the RunCloud API to automate the setup of some projects, so there's that too.

I have two wishes for RC, and that is that they introduce third party backup destinations (i.e. your own S3 buckets) and have fewer WordPress-only features.

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2 hours ago, Craig said:

I have two wishes for RC, and that is that they introduce third party backup destinations (i.e. your own S3 buckets) and have fewer WordPress-only features.

110% agree.

Everybody was so mad when they announced something that is NOT dropping your backups on a custom destination haha.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/8/2020 at 5:44 AM, millipedia said:

Hard to give a comparison because I've not used the other services but we switched to Cloudways about 18 months ago and they've worked well for us ( much faster than the previous hosting company we used).

Love Cloudways. Ability to clone a site/app is great. For usual sites, I can use it as a starting point with the default modules ready to go for the next site.

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10 hours ago, HMCB said:

Ability to clone a site/app is great. For usual sites, I can use it as a starting point with the default modules ready to go for the next site.

I can't believe that never occured to me - I'm going to push my skeleton project to a new app right  now.

Finally 2020 is begining to look up ...

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On 12/21/2020 at 5:13 AM, millipedia said:

I can't believe that never occured to me - I'm going to push my skeleton project to a new app right  now.

Finally 2020 is begining to look up ...

Let me know how it goes. Report back.

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21 hours ago, HMCB said:

Let me know how it goes. Report back.

ok, well at the risk of hijacking this thread and turning it my dev process (hey, it is dev-talk anyway) ...

I've created an app on Cloudways which is a skeleton project with the settings I nearly always end up using on a project. These are (more or less):

Modules:

AIOM
TfaTopt
Tracy Debugger
TextformatterVideoEmbed
TextformatterVideoEmbedOptions
TextformatterTableWrapper

there are more that probably could go on that list but I think pretty much every site I've done has those.

Config tweaks:

adding Markup Regions and webp, and disabling session fingerprinting when the site's in debug cos otherwise I keep getting logged out when testing in responsive design mode ...

Templates:

Basic site layout and then various things like pulling in meta tags / CSP etc, generating a nonce for inline scripts, password protecting the site whilst it's in debug mode. CSS gets pulled in either via AIOM or directly if the site is in debug.

For CSS I generally have half a dozen files (definitions / grid / nav / typography and so on) that I've built up over the years but are mostly based on bits of other libraries eg we pretty much have the Bootstrap grid

then there's adding a humans.txt file and tweaks to .htaccess (things like Strict-Transport-Security and ahem, X-Clacks-Overhead ).

And there's a few application settings like disabling Varnish which never seems to work well for me on dynamic sites.

What else ... oh yeah, a .vscode folder in the root of the project set to 400 so I don't accidently upload project settings (yeah that's happened).

Now I can just clone that skeleton app in Cloudways and I'm off to a great start for a new project.

Looks like cron jobs aren't cloned which is a shame because I have a cron job I normally use to dump database backups (which are easier to roll back than the default Cloudways backups) but that's easy enough to add.

And it would be nice to be able to prompt me to change the PW admin user login as well when I log into the cloned site so I don't end up resusing passwords. I'll have a think about that.

I'm sure this will save me time going forward - best get on with the sites I was supposed to be building today though....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I have user Serverpilot back when they had a free tier and was very happy with it. For my local development I used Vagrant and was able to install Serverpilot in my Vagrant machine so my development and production environments were 100% identical. That's a big plus!

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On 12/23/2020 at 11:21 AM, millipedia said:

Modules:
TextformatterTableWrapper

 

Well that’s a pretty thorough report back ? Awesomeness!

I’ll have to check into that TableWrapper module. Never heard of it.

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  • 2 months later...
On 12/10/2020 at 9:00 PM, d'Hinnisdaël said:

We've switched most of our servers to a setup of Hetzner VPS managed via Ploi. I haven't found many differences between Cloudways, ServerPilot, Moss, Ploi, etc. if all you're doing is hosting simple Laravel or ProcessWire sites.

The main advantage seems to be speed here — compared to shared hosting, the sites are between 4 to 10 times faster even when hosted on the cheapest Hetzner instance at 3$/month and with security and updates taken care by Ploi. We liked Ploi because it's great at regular backups, has lots of notification channels for automatic deploys and the admin panel is very polished.

How have you found ploi? Im well up for making use of their additional server types. 

Specifically it doesn't look like they give an Apache option, are you running Processwire on Nginx? 

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1 hour ago, StanLindsey said:

How have you found ploi? Im well up for making use of their additional server types. 

Specifically it doesn't look like they give an Apache option, are you running Processwire on Nginx? 

It's working great, we're not missing much in terms of features. I think ploi did at some point offer Apache + Nginx but scrapped the option. We're running ProcessWire on Nginx now. It requires some extra work here and there but is running smoothly overall.

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  • 10 months later...
On 3/28/2021 at 4:14 PM, d'Hinnisdaël said:

It's working great, we're not missing much in terms of features. I think ploi did at some point offer Apache + Nginx but scrapped the option. We're running ProcessWire on Nginx now. It requires some extra work here and there but is running smoothly overall.

@d'HinnisdaëlI know there are older threads talking about nginx configuration for processwire, but just curious if you can share any of your configuration files that are working good for you? I don't have a clue about nginx but really want to start using ploi

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