Setting Up a DigitalOcean Managed MySQL Database and Adding It to SpinupWP

This guide will help you set up a DigitalOcean managed MySQL database for use with new servers set up by SpinupWP. By the end of this tutorial, you will have the database hostname, port, username, password, and database name you need to configure the managed MySQL database as an external database in SpinupWP. We also…

Setting Up a Vultr Managed MySQL Database and Adding It to SpinupWP

This guide will help you set up a Vultr managed MySQL database for use with new servers set up by SpinupWP. By the end of this tutorial, you will have the database hostname, port, username, password, and database name you need to configure the managed MySQL database as an external database in SpinupWP. Setting Up…

Setting Up an Akamai/Linode Managed MySQL Database and Adding It to SpinupWP

This guide will help you set up an Akamai/Linode managed MySQL database for use with new servers set up by SpinupWP. By the end of this tutorial, you will have the database hostname, port, username, password, and database name you need to configure the managed MySQL database as an external database in SpinupWP. To get…

Setting Up an Amazon Lightsail Managed MySQL Database and Adding It to SpinupWP

This guide will help you set up an Amazon Lightsail managed MySQL database for use with new servers set up by SpinupWP. By the end of this tutorial, you will have the database hostname, port, username, password, and database name you need to configure the managed MySQL database as an external database in SpinupWP. We…

Sudo Users and Site Users

SpinupWP utilizes two different types of system users. These users allow you to safely and conveniently manage your servers and sites. Let’s take a look at each. Sudo Users Following security best practices, SpinupWP disables SSH access for the root user on all servers. Instead, you can add sudo users, which will have sudo access. This…

The SpinupWP Cache Daemon

The cache daemon is a little Go app we’ve written and deploy to every server to help with purging the page cache. The reason we need this daemon is an issue of file permissions. Each site runs a PHP pool as the site user but since cache files are owned by user www-data PHP cannot…

Troubleshooting Backup Failures

While it’s not a common occurrence, there may be an instance where backing up your site files and database might fail. SpinupWP will actively notify you of this, both in the app and by email, so you’re made aware of it as soon as it happens. Large backups When site backups get up to hundreds of…

Understanding PHP Pools

As described in Understanding System Users all sites deployed via SpinupWP are owned by a unique system user. This provides security isolation on the server because a site user cannot read or modify another site’s files. Each site is also deployed with a PHP-FPM resource pool, which is owned by the site user. This prevents…

Upgrading to a New Ubuntu LTS Release

If you SSH into an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server, you might see a message that encourages you to simply run a command to upgrade to 20.04 LTS: We strongly recommend against upgrading any server with a command like this for a few reasons. However, we can recommend the following options. Option 1: Start Fresh Instead of…

Using SFTP to Connect to Your SpinupWP Servers

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is still a popular way to connect to a web server and manage files on the server. FTP applications like Cyberduck and FileZilla allow users to connect to the server using a GUI interface similar to a computer’s file explorer application. SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol or Secure File Transfer Protocol)…