FastCat Releases New Managed WordPress Platform

fastcat_servers

Hello everyone

FastCat Servers is proud to announce the release of our Managed WordPress platform! It's our newest service built from the ground up for customers who want WordPress hosting without the downsides of the traditional shared hosting control-panel model. Plans starting at $14.99/mo.

Our goal is straightforward: give each WordPress site an isolated deployment model, integrated backups and restores, automated SSL, and a panel designed specifically for administrating WordPress sites.

What's Included

• One dedicated container stack for each site, isolating WordPress and MariaDB. Our infrastructure deployment per site, rather than placing every customer’s site, PHP process, database, and web server in one shared operating-system environment.
• On-demand phpMyAdmin and SFTP access from the panel. These services are started only when requested.
• Free automated SSL certificate issuance and renewal.
• Custom-domain support and optional site-*.fastcat.app domains for staging, testing, or simple deployments.
• Automated DNS detection using multiple resolvers and authoritative nameserver checks, DNS check and SSL install also works with proxies like Cloudflare.
• Integrated WP-CLI access from inside the site environment.
• Manual WordPress core updates with a backup created by default.
• Optional automatic WordPress minor and security updates.
• 10 included site-backup slots, with additional backup capacity available as an add-on.
• No mandatory FastCat WordPress plugins.
• Email notifications for important account and panel activity, including logins, new sites, and new phpMyAdmin or SFTP sessions.

The Engineering

We're excited to share the engineering philosophy behind our latest hosting offering, starting with a look at the most popular infrastructure set ups of WordPress/general web hosting, both in competitor offerings and deployment standards.

Confirming what we have thought to ourselves for years, the strongest fundamentals were easy to form: no more putting everything on the same box! Too much of web hosting infrastructure (on the part of hosts) relies on the legacy model of obfuscating customer sites as Linux users with the public html being somewhere in the user's home directory. All users share the same database install, serve from the same webserver, share the same PHP-FPM or node.js service, or caching layers like varnish. With all of these things being ordinary Linux packages installed in the same environment. This model relies on ACLs and cgroups to act as walls between customer site installs.

But[1] relying[2] on[3] those[4] boundaries[5] is[6] imperfect[7].

A new foundation for deploying web hosting sites, modeled after the widespread adoption of deploying and scaling services using modern containerization technology like Docker or LXC, is emerging among web hosts. Building our in-house web hosting architecture, starting with a platform we know and begrudgingly love in WordPress, was our goal before we found a few others were doing the same. Our new architecture and panel are built for WordPress.

We built our WordPress hosting this way:

• Each individual site is a container stack of WordPress and MariaDB, with sidecar phpmyadmin and sftp containers brought up on-demand when these features are used in the panel. The container stack is in a sophisticated orchestrator, with an enterprise-level management plane sitting between it and our panel.
• DNS and network routing is comprehensively built. Customers can select between running their site under their domain (most common) or under a site-*.fastcat.app domain (staging or ultra-simple sites). Totally free and automated install/renewal of SSL certificates.
• Automatically detects DNS as quickly as possible for new sites, through multiple resolvers, direct NS server queries, and even behind proxies like Cloudflare.
• Another benefit of our container stack deployments: minimal downtimes! Our architecture relies on stack replicas, so major changes from the panel will first scale up a new replica before bringing your site down.
• WP-CLI can be run inside the WordPress container in the site's stack, allowing the customer to see the plugin, theme, and WP versions and updates. WP core updates can be manually triggered (with backup taken by default). WP minor/security core updates can also be set automatically.
• Backup and restore is snappy and seamlessly integrated, all customers get 10 free site backups with the option to add more.
• Billing based on monthly visitors count with addons to extend site storage, bandwidth, and number of backup slots. We were convinced for a long time that billing for compute (vCPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth) was the best way. But we came to the obvious conclusion most of the industry seems to have too: customers, even the technical ones, will often not know how much of each resource their site will use. We have a billing and plan limit-counting model that aligns with other managed WP services, and in some places is better for the consumer like with regards to meeting or exceeding limits. However, we have a feeling that with a little more experience in providing this service, we can come up with an even better model under the hood for the billing and resource model.
• Customers are emailed for almost every major action taken on the panel for security purposes by default and can be configured. This includes login, new sites, and new phpmyadmin/sftp instances.
• No mandatory plugins installed from us.

Check it out at: https://fastcat.co/wordpress

fastcat_servers

We wanted to post a promo price for LET users with this, but we're not sure if that + the link in the post would be not okay for the news forum. I'll double check the rules, I don't remember anything covering that but I know there probably is.

Edit: nothing on the LET or news forum rules about whether or not we can post promo pricing here, but better to play it safe and not to. If you're a LET community member, please PM us for a promo

nghialele

$7/yr and we call it a promo