148 - Spinning up a WordPress optimised server in minutes with Spinup WP

Interview - Spinning up a WordPress optimised server in minutes with Spinup WP

Today we chat with Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains. Delicious Brains are a team of eight full timers who do nothing but WordPress. They have a bunch of products that I'm sure you've heard of, such as WP Migrate DB Pro, WP Offload Media and WP Offload SES, but we're not here today to talk about those, even though we really could have done a podcast on each product!

Today we're talking most of the time about Spinup WP, a new way of hosting your website.

When we recorded this podcast, which was a little ago now, this product was in beta, but it seems that this label has now been dropped. It might be that some of the other fine details have changed a bit too, but I doubt it as what we talk about is a very high level discussion about the platform, and it's unlikely that any of that will have altered significantly.

Spinup WP allows you to quickly spin up a server. This is a WordPress specific server with a bespoke server admin panel. You get great performance because of full page caching, and a while raft of other features, and the while process only takes about ten minutes!

There are so many hosting options available to WordPress professionals that I sometimes think that it's hard to keep up. Pity those who are just looking to launch their own website and have zero interest or background in WordPress hosting! There's shared hosting, VPS, dedicated, managed WordPress hosting and all of the cloud service that have popped up lately.

Each of these options have a range of benefits and drawbacks. Usually this revolves around a trade off of money v's customisation. I think that it is also true to say that it's quite possible to be somewhat mislead. Things like... unlimited disk space, 100% uptime. We all know that this is simply not possible and yet sometimes the price is just so tempting!

More recently we've seen a whole range of companies start to leverage the enormous infrastructure that companies like Amazon, Google and Digital Ocean have. They build their service on top of these other highly available platforms and build their own applications so that you don't have to learn the incredibly complex ins and outs they they can require.

Spinup WP enables you to hook up to any service that offers you some hard disk space and has SSH available. It's completely platform agnostic and will connect to pretty much any modern cloud hosting platform and take you through the pain of setting up a WordPress optimised server.

As of the recording of this podcast Spinup WP has a special relationship with Digital Ocean. You can sign up with Spinup WP and they will automate all-the-things if you choose to go the Digital Ocean route. You won't need to configure anything at all. All other providers will require you to sign up with their platform first, then copy / paste the SSH keys over to Spinup WP. Hardly a big deal, but a tiny bit more work. Brad does say that they have plans to roll the 'easy' version of their platform to other cloud providers in due course, so you might want to go and check out what's what on their website.

Brad is pretty clear that if you have literally zero background in working with technology (and no interest in learning) then Spinup WP might not be for you. But... fear not... if you're a willing learner and have played with code a bit in past and like problem solving, then this is not going to be out of bounds for you! Phew! They have plenty of guidance within the app as well as a bunch of WordPress hosting blog posts which will help you if you are worried about your technical capabilities.

So the idea is that you can get a server and WordPress site up and running in the time that it takes to make and (not quite) finish a coffee. Most of that time is literally spent waiting! Brad says that the whole process from logging in until the site is ready to interact with is about 10 minutes. There's a lot going on in that 10 minutes too. All of this is installed:

• nginx
• PHP fpm
• MySQL - MariaDB
• Redis - for object caching
• Git - for auto Git deployment
• WP-CLI
• Composer
• CertBot (Let's Encrypt)
• Firewall
• WordPress - Single site, Multi site

If you decide to use WordPress single site Spinup WP will install a couple of plugins. Limit Login attempts and their own caching plugin to ensure that WordPress works well with their system.

They also enable server logs and put that log data in a directory which is not publicly available.

This seems like such a great product for those of you who want to get servers up and running in double quick time and don't really want to learn the ins and outs of cloud servers and how to setup and maintain them.

Mentioned in this episode:

Delicious Brains

Spinup WP

Spinup WP pricing

WP Migrate DB Pro

WP Offload Media

WP Offload SES