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Where/how do you host multiple sites?

Hey IH,

Does anyone have a cool solution for hosting multiple client/personal websites?

I have ~15 Craft CMS (PHP) websites for clients, and some personal projects in Laravel (PHP).

They can't afford a dedicated host per site (like Servd), so was hoping for the economies of scale of a beefy VPS.

I have moved a bunch to Next/Gatsby and it's been a dream not having to worry about downtime! But these other ones need a CMS.

They aren't mission critical if they went down for an hour, but I don't want to spend my life in devops either! The bottom line would be that I don't want one website to bring down the rest of them.

I'm currently using AWS EC2 with Dokku, but it's getting pretty outdated and I'm too scared to update it in case it brings the lot down.

I've used ServerPilot in the past which is close but similar issues.

Do I look into Kubenetes (using namespaces for multiple sites) on Digital Ocean? Is that going to be any more resilient?

Would love any pointers or where to look next. Thanks, IH.

  1. 2

    I host everything on Google Cloud Platform. Its a great place to get anything running quickly and they offer $300 dollars of credit for new users. What ever your needs are, you can run in GCP and organize in a very efficient way with their hierarchy and IAM polcies.

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    Multi site WordPress on a dedicated VM (aws, vultr, whatever) is I think the most cost effective while getting predictable performance and availability.

    You could use any of the shared hosting out there, for cheap, but actual performance is wonky, and server access quite limited if you want to control your stack (php modules etc)

    It costs me less than $50 per month to host dozens of sites and all have stunning response time. If any site becomes an outlier, I move it to its own dedicated VM.

  3. 2

    I host most of my PHP apps on a shared Hostgator plan. I paid like $150 for 3 years (about $4/mo). If performance is not vital, some of the popular shared hosting platforms are pretty decent.

    Interesting thing is that the plan was advertised as $550/3 years, but after some refreshes, coming back a few days later, and pretending to not care about the offer, I kept getting better and better deals (pretty scummy tactic from their part if you ask me, they just try to make you pay as much as possible).

  4. 2

    I'm currently using AWS EC2 with Dokku, but it's getting pretty outdated and I'm too scared to update it in case it brings the lot down.

    Instead of changing solutions, I'd recommend cloning the instance for a test run of the upgrade. Edit your hosts file to point the domains to the new server and test them out.

    Then you can either run the upgrade on the live server (Making sure to give warning to your clients about potential downtime) or if your data is on RDS and uploads are on S3, you could change the DNS to point to the new servers.

    They aren't mission critical if they went down for an hour, but I don't want to spend my life in devops either! The bottom line would be that I don't want one website to bring down the rest of them.

    If you don't want to handle devops that's fair enough but this usually comes at a cost. Heroku is a good alternative, and since your using Dokku you may have the configuration in place that makes the transition fairly simple anyway.

    Some other solutions I've come across that might be worth checking out:

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    It is possible you just need a suitable hosting service that provides such a service. I can't provide free hosting services exactly like this, so be prepared to use paid to host and pay for it. Try hosting at https://www.hostingcanada.pro I think you will be able to find a solution. I've been using it for my site for a long time. He has very favorable terms, which cost me a couple of bucks, which makes me very happy. Also, I have never had problems with communication and the site works absolutely well

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