Craft isn’t an average CMS, so avoid average hosting

If you find that most content management systems (CMS) are limiting, and you want more flexibility when customising a unique site design and feel, Craft CMS is definitely an option to consider.

What is Craft CMS?

It is a flexible CMS that can work well for design portfolios, multinational marketing sites, ecommerce and others in between. With its library of plug-ins, Craft CMS can help you build a powerful website with less technical labour.

Here at SiteHost we choose Craft CMS for a range of sites and applications. It’s been in our toolkit for seven years now, so it’s fair to say that SiteHost is deeply part of the Craft community both as users and hosts.

That community is growing, and global. Sometimes it seems like everyone who discovers Craft CMS quickly becomes a fan. In New Zealand’s local scene, we have web developer clients who see a similar trend.

Last year we interviewed Mark Collister at Auckland agency The Fold. He said:

Quite often clients will think that they want a WordPress site, but they actually want to do something more complex. It's not going to be sensible to try and pull together WordPress plugins to achieve that. So we end up doing something more customised on Craft CMS.

Just like Craft CMS is more than an entry-level CMS, Craft CMS hosting needs to meet certain standards. These include offering enough server capacity, PHP extensions, MySQL user privileges and many more.

As well as these technical hurdles, we believe that quality Craft CMS hosting comes from providers who understand Craft CMS itself, as well as the community that has built up around it.

Keep Craft CMS off shared hosting

Developers should know that the makers of Craft CMS, Pixel & Tonic, advise against shared hosting, citing its low quality, high risk with disruptive neighbours and restrictive options for setup, deployment and customisation. We agree.

The next step up from shared hosting is usually a virtual private server (VPS), which solves a lot of the problems of shared hosting but often means that you take on a lot of system admin work. It becomes your job to establish and manage the environment that Craft CMS runs in, which can be a time-consuming drag when you’d rather be designing and developing.

When we designed Cloud Containers we wanted to create web hosting that avoids the pitfalls of shared hosting as well as the complexity of VPS. Today this means that developers can easily spin up hosting with everything that Craft CMS needs to run quickly, securely, and reliably. No system administration required.

That’s how Mark at The Fold has been operating with Craft CMS. As he puts it, having SiteHost as a hosting partner means having ”peace of mind.”

Cloud Containers provide that peace of mind by giving developers like Mark the flexibility and control it takes to build great Craft CMS sites, while leaving server maintenance with SiteHost.

A closer look at SiteHost’s Cloud Containers

With Cloud Containers you can keep multiple websites on fast, up-to-date infrastructure. These containers offer a huge amount of control for developers while still being easy to use. To quote another customer of ours, Ryan from Do Good Things:

Once we’d decided to go with Craft, I found SiteHost, and it made my life literally about 20% easier, maybe more.

Building with Craft CMS on our Cloud Containers gives you easy control over PHP versioning and updates, environment variables and more. This makes Cloud Containers a great way to host any number of Craft CMS (and other) websites.

We’ve built the Cloud Container platform with developers in mind, and we’re always making improvements with users in mind. Simple cache, for example, came directly from work we did to help one of our customers out of a very tight spot. Container cloning and syncing fulfilled a common request from users who wanted a quick way to create development or test environments, and to safely get changes back to the live site. A third recent example is Improved SSH Security, which we brought in after requests from customers to disable some of the less secure algorithms and ciphers used by SSH on their Cloud Containers.

Expert support and server management

As well as offering great technology for hosting Craft CMS, we have an expert in-house support team working 24/7 as well. We respond to queries in minutes, not hours (or days) and we always have an engineer available.

By adding Managed Services to your Cloud Containers you get even more of our care and expertise. We’ll monitor your servers; perform tweaks, updates and installations that you request; proactively patch critical security operating system flaws; and automatically keep images up-to-date.

It’s our blend of high-quality infrastructure and genuine service that helps Craft CMS developers like Mark and Ryan do great work and worry less about hosting.