Taking the pain out of self managed cloud hosting with ServerPilot

(Disclaimer, links to ServerPilot and Digital Ocean contain referral codes, if you use them and make a purchase you’ll be putting a few extra $’s in my pocket)

As the web and it’s associated technologies move ever forward, the solutions available for hosting your website are about as abundant as the options available for creating it.

One of my favourite advances in hosting options has been the advent of Virtual Private Servers or VPS. What I like about VPS is that it gives you the same level of control to the base system as a physical server, but at a fraction of the cost, and with similar performance to a physical server. Over the years services like Amazon AWS, Digital Ocean and Linode have really reduced the cost of creating and managing your own web server using VPS technology. The only problem with using a VPS is that you need to have a level of understand of server technology, software and server administration to be able to setup and manage such a server, something which most web designers, developers and builders do not.

With this in mind I was quite pleasantly surprised when someone pointed out ServerPilot to me. ServerPilot provides a fast, managed and secure way to manage your VPS without needing too much technical knowledge. On installing ServerPilot on your newly purchased VPS, you are given tools which allow you to create and manage multiple PHP apps on your server. What is even better is that ServerPilot supports WordPress straight out of the box, so setting up a new blank WordPress site is a simple matter of clicking a few buttons.

Without a doubt one of the things I love about ServerPilot is the technology stack. It’s built using Nginx in front of Apache, comes pre installed with PHP-FPM and supports PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, and 7.1, all on the same server. It even installs and configures a firewall on your server as well as SecureFTP access, automatically updates itself and supports LetsEncrypt SSL, giving you the option to install and configure free SSL certificates for all your sites. Finally, depending on the package you choose, it provides various levels of server monitoring, from basic server CPU and Memory usage, all the way up to slow script reporting.

ServerPilot is about the best tool for web professionals who would like a little more control of their (and their client’s) hosting options. At $10 for the ‘Coach’ version, you can install and manage as many servers as you like. It’s designed to use Digital Ocean servers, but supports the majority of the VPS services out there (Amazon AWS, Rackspace, Linode, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud).

If you are currently using VPS based services or are looking for alternatives to your current hosting provider, I highly recommend to try out the free version of ServerPilot. If you don’t want to spend any money on the VPS to try it out, you can use my Digital Ocean referral link for a $10 credit, which is enough for a 512MB droplet for two months, more than enough time to test out the service.