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WPMUDEV Hosting Off Of Own Amazon EC2 Instance?

Hi,

I just saw that there's going to be shared hosting that WPMUDEV is beta-testing right now.

My question is whether WPMUDEV plans to get into doing a different kind of hosting where I get to run my own Amazon EC2 instance but WPMUDEV still provides some minimal sysAdmin type services and tools without the full-blown handholding of shared hosting.

I know enough Linux to at least migrate my site and host a staging site or two as well as production site, but all other sysAdmin tasks like checking for Malware, Load Balancing, Ubuntu updates, etc. is where I'm not so sure about going it alone while still creating content and managing plugins and code.

Thanks

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 21:45:55
  • Nick Simpson
    • The Crimson Coder

    It looks like an automated migration service will be coming to the platform soon Johnny.

    I think the idea is going to be that you don’t have to worry about any of the administrative tasks, that is all taken care of. This way you can focus on development and content creation as you say.

  • Johnny T Cheng
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    Hi Nick,

    I know how to do migration on my own though a more turn-key migration service would be beneficial assuming I could migrate to my own host.

    That brings me to my main concern regarding this question as it’s more from a price-performance standpoint.

    While I’ve already given shared hosting a shot with services like MDDHosting and Cloudways, I’m very well aware that the size of my site (i.e. the size of my mySql database) is going to require a more dedicated server or instance.

    That said, I’m aware that going it alone with sysAdmin tasks on an Amazon EC2 reserved instance or Digital Ocean series of droplets is a bit of a time-consuming endeavor where as full-service shared hosting is problematic on the other extreme in terms of what I’d be paying for similar performance.

    So does WPMUDEV have any plans to provide a more in-between solution instead of this all-or-nothing choice that I seem to be faced with.

    Thanks,

    Johnny

  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Johnny T Cheng

    I think there’s something that should be cleared up first :slight_smile:

    The WPMU DEV hosting is not a shared hosting, there’s nothing shared there. Each and every website that you great gets its own, fully separated and dedicated droplet. Basically, it’s exactly what you’re asking about: our own, fully managed solution built on top of Digital Ocean droplets and some additional Amazon features.

    In other words, unlike on shared hosting, all the sites that you create have their own resources, not shared with any other site – nor yours, neither of any other Member. There’s also full access to phpMyAdmin, the SFTP access and even SSH so that gives you some “basic level” sys-admin access.

    There are certain limitations in what you can and cannot do this way as this is a fully managed WP hosting so in fact WPMU DEV provides actually much more than “minimum sysadmin services” so you wouldn’t have to worry about the “under the hood” stuff. But still – I think there’s been a confusion about it being “shared” hosting, while it’s not at all, so I hope that addresses your concerns from the initial post :slight_smile:

    Best regards,

    Adam

  • Johnny T Cheng
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    Hi Adam,

    So if I was to do a bit of comparison shopping for price versus performance versus time / service / tools, where does WPMUDEV hosting services compare in this spectrum of choices?

    1) Bare bones, on-your-own Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance or Digital Ocean Droplets and nothing else

    2) Server Pilot on top of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance or Digital Ocean Droplets

    3) Managed (shared) hosting with Cloudways on top of Digital Ocean Droplets

    4) Full Service Shared Hosting (e.g. MDDHosting, WPEngine, BlueHost, etc.)

  • Aaron
    • Ex Staff

    We are most similar to option 3 with much more customization and features. We control the underlying infrastructure, it doesn’t use your own cloud provider account, and you don’t get root access but we provide pretty powerful ssh access and developer tools, as well as really advance managed features that exceed Cloudways. Example Cloudways charges extra for backups, and use less advanced incremental technology. We include unlimited backups for 30 days. And our staging technology is extremely advanced compared to almost every competitor.

  • Johnny T Cheng
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    Follow up question.

    Since I plan on running a medium- / large- website, I need to get a sense of what I need to do and what are its limits if I was to go with this service.

    According to Google Analytics, the average number of users in a month peaked at 160k for my static html website that I will very soon re-launch as a WordPress site (so I expect this number to increase and I expect server to load to increase as well given the increased number of queries required to run WP loops).

    I don’t have a good sense of how this translates into the kind of DO droplet or Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance I should get (#cpus, RAM, data transfer, SSD size, etc.). And I don’t understand what are the limits of managed hosting to handle this kind of situation.

    I’ve read about load balancing multiple servers instead of doing a single very expensive server, and a bunch of other things that I as a non-system admin person wouldn’t be able to process at the moment. I just have a working knowledge of using wp-cli and basic linux stuff from my Ubuntu virtual box or ssh’ing into my current shared host (MDDHosting).

    Any idea on what would be necessary for my situation, and how WPMUDEV managed hosting would figure into this?

    Would managed hosting handle load balancing? Firewall and OS/apps updates? Error logging?

    This is kind of the area that I’m unclear about what I’m really getting with managed hosting and how it would apply to this situation. So any clarity on this would be most appreciated.

    Thanks,

    Johnny

  • Aaron
    • Ex Staff

    It’s hard to tell as it will be heavily dependent on your themes/plugins/visitors, but I think with HB page cache enabled sounds about what we project our highest plan should be able to handle.

    We only do load balancing/failover/HA for our enterprise hosting product. As a managed host we take care of all the server side stuff, firewall, updates, etc. We even have super advanced system stats available for you on request. Logs are available in the hub or you can download them there too.