1Generate a DigitalOcean access token
Log in to your DigitalOcean account and generate a new Personal Access Token that SpinupWP can use to create new Droplets.
In fact, we run all our infrastructure on DigitalOcean.
No software installation necessary. Just give SpinupWP access and you can manage your server remotely.
It’s like a remote control for your server, designed for WordPress.
Probably the biggest difference between DigitalOcean and other cloud server providers is the design and user experience of the DigitalOcean dashboard. It’s an absolute pleasure to use.
DigitalOcean’s docs are legendary. We’ve also used their API extensively and it’s definitely one of the best we’ve ever programmed against.
Most cloud server providers have complex pricing, but not DigitalOcean. They offer simple, flat pricing across all regions, so no billing surprises. And it’s very competitive pricing too.
It is remarkable how little downtime we’ve experienced over the years running our servers on DigitalOcean. We trust DigitalOcean to keep us online and not cause us a bunch of hassle.
Since we don’t yet have monitoring or alerting built-into SpinupWP, it’s really nice that DigitalOcean provides this out-of-the-box. No need to set up and pay for a third-party service.
New to DigitalOcean? Sign up with our special link and receive $100 in credits.
In this article we dive deep on each of these providers, comparing ease of use, cost,
and benchmarking performance running a WordPress site.
I'm loving what the @dliciousbrains team has done with @spinupwp - spinning up #WordPress on a @digitalocean droplet has never been easier or more fun!
Log in to your DigitalOcean account and generate a new Personal Access Token that SpinupWP can use to create new Droplets.
Plug in the Personal Access Token you just generated to add your DigitalOcean account to SpinupWP.
Next you choose the size of Droplet you’d like to spin up, its region, and whether you’d like to enable DigitalOcean backups or not. After that, it’s just a matter of providing a hostname, timezone, and the database server (MySQL or MariaDB) you’d prefer.
Sit back while SpinupWP does the nitty gritty of installing all the software and tuning it to run your WordPress site as fast and as reliably as possible.
Ten minutes later, your fresh new DigitalOcean Droplet optimized for WordPress server will be ready for you.
When you add a new site to your SpinupWP server, we configure a free SSL certificate, cron jobs, caching rules, and everything else that a high-performing WordPress site requires.
Add dev sites, staging sites, production sites, whatever you like.
Need root access? No problem, add as many SSH users as you like with full root access via sudo. You have the keys to your castle. Need to give a client SSH or SFTP access to their site? Each site is set up with its own SSH user that only has access to that one site.
Your new server is loaded with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and the latest packages of Nginx, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, and Redis. Standard installs, no weird custom-built packages or strange paths. Everything should be where you expect it to be, configured how you’d expect for performance.
And you can walk away anytime. Though sticking around means not having to keep up with security updates or worry about changes in best practices, you can disconnect your server from SpinupWP any time and have a go at managing it yourself. We don’t lock you in.
Want to manually tweak some configuration files on the server via SSH? Go ahead. Even if it’s a configuration file that SpinupWP edits, it can handle it.
Worried about keeping your server secure? Don’t be. Your server is configured with a firewall and security updates are installed automatically as they are released. We also notify you when there’s a major update available for a software package you have installed (e.g. Nginx) and provide you instructions on how to upgrade.
Managed Hosting | Self Hosting | SpinupWP | |
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Speedy but Affordable | |||
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Start your SpinupWP journey today and spin up your first server within minutes.
Shout out to SpinupWP for actually understanding how devs deploy sites. The ability to validate SSL before pointing your domain is a KILLER feature.
We support DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, and any other provider. If your server has an IP address, you can connect SpinupWP. It does need to be a fresh install of Ubuntu though.
SpinupWP will configure your server to install security updates as soon as they are available to reduce the likelihood a software vulnerability putting your server at risk.
SpinupWP will install the latest stable versions of Nginx, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, and Redis from the standard apt-get repos. No who-knows-what-they-did custom builds of packages. Disconnect from SpinupWP in the future and you can still keep your packages up-to-date with apt-get upgrade
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When you add a site to SpinupWP, a free Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS certificate will be acquired, installed, and configured for your site. And SpinupWP will handle certificate renewals as well, so you hardly need to think about certificates.
One of the keys to a great performing WordPress site is caching. All sites are set up with Redis object caching to greatly reduce database requests. And with the check of a box you can enable full-page caching to serve pages lightning fast without even hitting PHP.
Developers! Developers! Developers! Add a git repository to your SpinupWP site and simply push to master to deploy your code. GitHub, Bitbucket, or a custom git repo will work. You can also configure a build script to run some tasks on the server after deployment is complete.
WordPress doesn’t enable error logging by default. Probably because the log is saved to a publicly accessible directory and can quickly balloon to take up a lot of hard drive space. SpinupWP enables error logs by default but stores them in a safe place and makes sure they’re rotated regularly like other server logs.
Each server provisioned by SpinupWP is security-hardened from the word go. SSH login is disabled for the root user (you login with your user and use sudo instead). The firewall only allows connections to Nginx and SSH and failed attempts are monitored and blocked when the reach a threshold. Nginx is configured to defend against XSS, clickjacking, MIME sniffing, and other attacks. Software security updates are installed automatically.
For every site you add via SpinupWP, a server-side cron job will be configured to make sure that your WordPress site’s cron is executed every minute, as it should be.
If you love WP-CLI (we do! ❤) you’ll be very pleased to find it available on the command line the first time you login to your server.
For each site that you add to your server via SpinupWP, a new system user is created for that site. All site files are owned by the site user and a PHP-FPM pool is configured to run as that user as well. Each site only has access to its files and so if only one site has a security vulnerability and gets infected with malware for example, only the files for that one site can be infected.
Need to deploy a staging site quickly? No problem! With SpinupWP you can create a complete copy of an existing site, which includes all files, the database, and server configuration. Ready to upgrade your site to a newer version of PHP but want to ensure your site is compatible? That’s where site cloning comes in. Create a site clone with a few simple clicks, then test the new PHP version in an isolated environment, without impacting your live site. Once you’re confident in the changes, you can flick the switch on your live site.
If you’re hosting a site for someone else, you can easily give them SFTP/SSH access to just that site. And because of the security isolation between sites, they will only have access to files for that site.
Create a new team account, invite a member of your team, and allow them to spin up their own servers. Or just only allow them to add sites, the permissions you give them is up to you.
SpinupWP will actively point you in the right direction and offer suggestions for maintaining your server. And because it provides detailed feedback about the operations it runs on your server, you can learn what is happening with your server.
New release of Ubuntu just came out, should I upgrade? We’ll add a notice to the app about that, why we don’t recommend upgrading your existing servers, and how you can spin up a new server with the new release of Ubuntu and migrate your sites to that server instead.
Should I install Varnish to improve page caching performance? We’ve benchmarked Varnish and Nginx FastCGI Cache performed better. Varnish would add complexity too, so one less moving part is another reason.
Much of the time SpinupWP will suggest things that you may not have even thought of. Email deliverability for example. SpinupWP will strongly encourage you to configure an email sending plugin for the best email deliverability.
SpinupWP’s guidance is especially helpful for those new to managing a server, but can also help those who’ve been at it a while, providing transparency to our decisions.
All server providers (DigitalOcean, Linode, etc) offer automated backups of your entire server for a fee. These services are great and we highly recommend having backups of your whole server.
But what happens if some media or data was deleted by accident from your WordPress site? You’re not going to restore your entire server just to get that data back.
That’s where site backups come in.
Site backups are full backups of your site files (media, themes, and plugins) and database. They allow you to easily restore a single site or just some files or data from a single site.
With SpinupWP’s site backups, you choose your preferred provider to stash your backups whether that’s Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, or Google Cloud Storage. You plug in your account details and SpinupWP will send your site backups there in an easy-to-see format.
Bundling hosting into a monthly maintenance plan for clients is a great way for freelancers and agencies to earn recurring monthly income and reduce the “feast or famine” cycles in their business.
You could achieve this by signing up with a managed WordPress host, but the cost would be so great that you would only make peanuts. Hardly worth doing. A server managed by SpinupWP would be far more cost effective and allow you to make significant profit.
We’re a small company of expert WordPress developers, the brains behind the popular WP Migrate DB Pro and WP Offload Media plugins, WordPress core contributors, and have been active members of the WordPress community since 2012. We know WordPress.
Unsolicited 5-star review: I've moved all of my WordPress sites to @digitalocean / @spinupwp and I couldn't be more impressed. A small learning curve to think differently after 20 years of managed hosting, but the experience and guidance has been great. #WordPress #webhosting
I've managed my own servers and setups and also worked with hosting companies. SpinupWP is literally the perfect solution that allows me the control I want, without the extra overhead. My sites are fast, the support is second to none, and their response to security notices helps me sleep well at night.
I just wanted to say thank you for continually improving SpinupWP. It's my favorite WP related product, I recommend it to everyone, and think it's great! I especially love the new redesign.
So far I am 100% in love with SpinupWP! Fully ready to go in minutes and 1000's of keystrokes saved!
SpinupWP deserves a 5-star rating. They provide an ASTONISHING service to host any WordPress site. I have been using this service for 6 months and I really like the overall performance of this software!
Combined with Cloudflare wildcard subdomains it works like treat. Can even have a template that we can keep on cloning when a new instance is needed.
Just wanted to say thanks a million for the clone feature. This saved me hours today, and I can see it saving me hours in the future. Kudos!!
So @dliciousbrains has done it again with @spinupwp. It's literally the best way to start new @WordPress sites
I'm really excited about @spinupwp because it feels like it is the state of the art for WordPress development.
I love WordPress. Thanks to @spinupwp, @richard_tabor's Grille theme, and @ConvertKit I was able to get an MVP for Plugin Curator up and running within an hour.
I moved 4 sites over to @spinupwp recently, and as a faithful user of one of their competitors, allow me to confirm this from @polevaultweb. This service bridges the gap between scary self-hosting and expensive managed hosting.
I've been playing around with SpinupWP for over 6 months now and have been consistently blown away. An incredible tool that will make your WP life 100x better! 🚀
SpinupWP has been great - a huge improvement for us over Cloudways, which was in turn a huge improvement over Siteground!
Moved the @_bnfw site to @spinupwp yesterday. Much faster and much more accessible (for me as a dev). Really smooth sign-up process, great help, clean interface. Really pleased.
I'm loving what the @dliciousbrains team has done with @spinupwp - spinning up #WordPress on a @digitalocean droplet has never been easier or more fun!
Spinning up the first site was so easy and straight forward. Definitely the best tool I've come across to date
I've been using it since beta launch, it is very, very good. Customer service has been top notch, as has listening to and acting on feedback and feature requests (in particular the new 'isolated sites' feature).
Amazingly easy. Everything that I want for working with a WordPress site. Your documentation is top notch. I can't wait to show this off to the rest of our team and to the local WP meetup.
SpinupWP has been the answer to several wishes I've had for years.
It's been INCREDIBLE the speed and setup is fantastic.
I've been using SpinupWP pretty much since it was announced, and it's an absolutely amazing piece of software. Managing WordPress servers/sites has never been more user intuitive!
Just used SpinupWP for my new WordPress site and it couldn’t have been easier!
I've spent the day migrating sites onto the @spinupwp platform (hosting via @digitalocean). I have to say I'm blown away by how easy and feature-filled the platform is. It was a pleasure to use and I'm looking forward to migrating the rest of our sites over! #wordpress #devops
Did my first server maintenance with SpinupWP and I'm floored. Such a great experience all around: email notification, dashboard UX, and update speed.
Taking @spinupwp for a ‘spin' today deploying a site to Digital Ocean. Nice job on the interface. Easy to understand and you've done all the work for me. No haggling with configurations in @digitalocean - I like it. 😍 Good #UX.
SpinupWP is AWESOME!!!! I LOVE IT!!! Works like a charm and I'm looking forward to new development.
Start your SpinupWP journey today and spin up your first server within minutes.