165 – Creating your own managed WordPress service, and keeping all the margin with Patrick Gallaghe
Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/02/06/165-c...
Interview– Creating your own managed WordPress service, and keeping all the margin with Patrick Gallagher
Today on the WP Builds WordPress podcast we have Patrick Gallagher from Gridpane , which is a new option for hosting your WordPress website.
We chat about this past with technology and how he developed a passion for working with WordPress, building hundreds of site over the years. Like all of us, he hunted around, trying to find the best hosting solution for his needs, but in all cases he found that there was something missing. So he decided that he was going to roll his own solution which he could then maintain and control himself, his own WordPress managed hosting company.
I’ve kind of oversimplified the story somewhat. In 2015 Patrick (and much of the internet) got hit by a Christmas day outage at Linode, a popular choice for offloading your hosting. Patrick was having a nice day with his family and suddenly the ‘site down’ emails began to arrive en-masse. So he had to go into work mode and get in touch with his clients to inform them that their sites were broken and there was no real way that he could fix them right away! A horrible moment, but worse for the fact that it was Christmas. This was the day that he decided to solve this problem once and for all.
So he started Gridpane with the idea that it would develop over time, and he began speaking about it in some online communities. As luck would have it a chap called Jeff Cleverley picked up upon Patrick’s message and then hit it off and Jeff has become the backbone of Gridpane.
They’ve been working on the stack since then, trying to perfect it, and we dwell for quite a long time on this…
This primarily revolves around building an automated platform for deploying your own WordPress install no matter what 3rd party service you’re using as the host.
Although it’s not true to say that Gridpane’s stack is aimed at developers who know their way around web hosting and how a server ought to be configured, you’ll get the most out of it if your are a competent server admin. They have hundreds of new customers and are more than happy to help them, but the bleeding edge performance is going to be open to those who know what they’re doing.
The other main feature of Gridpane is the speed with which you can get a WordPress website up and running. If you install WordPress manually, you know that this involves multiples steps – create a database, download WordPress core and get that onto the server, link WordPress to that database. This is the famous 5 minute install, and once you’ve done it a few times it’s really easy to do. However, even that can be a pain, and so managed WordPress hosts make that much easier – you will out a few fields, click some buttons and they create everything for you and email you a handful of minutes later to say that it’s all up and running.
Gridpane go a few steps even further, making it even more efficient. So it’s things like removing the need to create a username and password for your WordPress install, instead they just use the one that you use for logging into Gridpane itself. Less to write down, less to remember, less time to create the website!
They try to make as many assumptions as they can about how you’re going to want to set up your WordPress website, so that you don’t have to jump through that hoop each time you create an installation.
So it’s little steps like predefining bundles which tell Gridpane that you want your install to include this SEO plugin, this theme and the DNS ought to be set up in a certain way. All you need to do is name the site, say on which server you want it to reside and hit ‘go’. That’s it, you’re done.
So, time saved. But what about all the other things that you’d hope for… Security – check, backups – check, updates – check. They do all of that too.
We have not yet got onto the what Gridpane actually links up with. So as of the release of this podcast they allow you to host your site on any of the follow servers:
• Linode
• Digital Ocean
• Vultr
• AWS Lightsail
• Google Compute
If you don’t want to use any of the above and have a server on your own hardware, so long as you have root access and know the IP address, you can use Gridpane. They have a script to enable their services.
Should you want to move your WordPress installs from one of the services mentioned above to another, you can do that. Patrick recommends that you get the smallest server that you think that you’re going to need and only beef them up at the point that you need that, but moving from Google to Amazon is really simple with Gridpane.
In terms of backups, they started out in the usual way doing daily backups, made available for 30 days. They now perform incremental backups, only backing up the changes that you have made recentl