Hosting Requirements

If you intend to purchase your own hosting plan, please ensure that the following requirements are met. DigitalOcean, Linode, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are all excellent choices. Of course our Managed Cloud VPS Hosting plan will provision your server with all of the necessary components.

Required Components

  • Linux (Ubuntu) server with SSH access and key authentication
  • Ability to define a public “web root” that is inside your home directory
  • Nginx or Apache Web Server
  • MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10+
  • PHP 7.0+
  • OpenSSL PHP Extension
  • PDO PHP Extension
  • Mbstring PHP Extension
  • Tokenizer PHP Extension
  • XML PHP Extension

Recommended Components/Capabilities

  • Git
  • Composer
  • NodeJS
  • Redis
  • Memcached
  • Beanstalkd
  • Supervisor
  • Ability to host multiple domains (i.e. staging and production sites)

Other Considerations

Domain Registration

If you have not yet registered your domain name, we recommend using Hover or Google Domains as your registrar. Both offer fair, no-nonsense pricing, free whois privacy, and very fast DNS resolution.

Primary Domain Email Service

Mail servers are complex beasts, and very difficult to manage properly. Although you may be tempted to use the email/webmail service packaged with your domain registration or hosting plan, we highly recommend that you host your domain’s email with a separate, dedicated provider such as Google Apps, Rackspace, Office 365/Microsoft Exchange Server, or Zoho Mail. Please consult your IT vendor for recommendations.

Outgoing (“Transactional”) Email Service

In addition to sending/receiving personal email via your domain, the website itself may also generate “transactional” emails, such as contact form submissions, password reset instructions, or automated messages to site visitors or administrators.

Although these messages can usually be sent via the web server’s built-in capabilities, it is highly recommended to utilize a third party transactional email services such as SparkPost, Mailgun, or SendGrid, as it increases deliverability, avoids “blacklisting” and provides a record of outbound message activity or deliverability issues. (If you are a MailChimp customer, you may want to look into Mandrill, their transactional service.)

It may also be necessary to modify your domain’s DNS records in order to authenticate these services.