What's New✨

Previously, selecting a server size when creating a new server in SpinupWP was pretty awful. You were presented with a very long list of options in a dropdown.

Lots of the information was duplicated and it was not easy to grok.

We’ve replaced this with a much better UI. First, you select the Region and any server sizes unavailable in that region will be grayed out. Then you can filter by category and on some providers you can also filter by CPU options and storage options. Server categories include an explanation so you can decide which category best fits your needs. We’ve also added a warning next to server sizes that are smaller than what we recommend.

We hope that these improvements make it easier for you to choose a server size the next time you’re creating a server in SpinupWP.

Previously, user settings were mixed in with personal account settings. If you had an account on the Team plan, you had to switch to your personal account to access the notification and security settings for your user which applied to all your accounts. It was confusing! 😕

Now your user account settings are always one click away in the main menu no matter which account you’re on. And personal accounts now behave exactly the same as team accounts. You can change the account name and avatar independent of your user profile.

Previously, you could only redirect a domain to the site’s primary domain. Now, when toggling on a domain redirect, a textbox will be prepopulated with the primary domain and you can edit it to redirect to any domain you like.

That’s Basic mode. If you switch to Advanced mode, you can define the complete URL it redirects to as well as the HTTP redirect status code it should use. You can even use Nginx variables in the URL it redirects to.

Managing a site’s domains has been moved out of the Settings tab to a new Domains tab for easier access and a bit more room.

You can now easily distinguish a site backup by adding a note to it. To add a note, click in the “Notes” column of a backup in the backups table. If there’s already a note, you can edit it by clicking on it. This will allow you to identify specific backups so you can quickly find and restore a backup when needed.

If you opt to create a backup when restoring a database, a note of “Prior to restoring backup from {{ date of backup being restored }}” will be added to the backup automatically. Similarly, if you choose to create a backup when updating WordPress core, plugins, and/or themes, a note of “Prior to updating WordPress core, themes, and plugins” will be added automatically. You can edit these notes as you like.

Todos is a list of maintenance tasks that you ought to perform on your server. SpinupWP identifies these tasks and presents them to you prioritized by how urgent they are. For example, if your server needs a reboot, that todo will start low on your list. However, over time, it will become more important that the server is rebooted and the todo will increase in priority, moving up the list.

Whether you’ve been managing your own servers for years or are just beginning, Todos will give you peace of mind that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing to keep your servers healthy and secure.

See our Todos doc to learn more about how Todos work and each Todo you can expect to see.

Notifications have not been updated in this first version of Todos. You’ll still get the same notification to reboot your server as soon as it is available for example. In the future we plan to refactor notifications and only notify you when a todo escalates to critical. For example, if a server reboot todo has been sitting for more than 60 days it will go critical and you’ll get a notification.

We also plan to offer a weekly email that you can toggle on/off that summarizes your Todos and help you stay on top of them without having to remember to check the app every week.

Also, we realize that to resolve many of the todos, you’re required to SSH into the server, which is not very convenient. In the future, we plan to offer one-click resolution of all todos from your SpinupWP dashboard.

SpinupWP now supports Akamai/Linode Object Storage as a backup storage provider.

You can now add, edit, and delete Akamai/Linode Object Storage instances from the Storage Providers Setting screen in the dashboard. Once this instance has been set up, you can configure any site’s backups to consume it by visiting the Backups tab for that site.

For more details, see our Akamai/Linode Object Storage doc.

Customers have been successfully using ARM servers with SpinupWP with only one issue: clearing the cache from within WordPress didn’t work. This has now been fixed and so SpinupWP now fully supports ARM servers. 🎉

Previously, in order to connect an Akamai/Linode server to SpinupWP, you would have needed to visit the Akamai dashboard to configure your server then go back to your SpinupWP dashboard to finish up the process.

We’ve added Akamai/Linode as an integrated server provider, alongside DigitalOcean. Akamai servers can now be provisioned and deleted directly from your SpinupWP dashboard. No more back and forth needed.

We’ve also recently added support for Akamai’s managed databases and we’re currently working on adding Akamai Object Storage as a supported storage provider for backups. Soon you’ll be able to take advantage of more of Akamai’s services.

For a detailed step by step, see our How to Install WordPress on Akamai doc.

Some providers (e.g. Akamai/Linode) only accept SSL connections to their managed databases while other providers (e.g. DigitalOcean, AWS Lightsail) accept SSL and non-SSL connections. SpinupWP will now configure new sites to use SSL connections to external databases. This means you can now use an Akamai managed database with a site created by SpinupWP whereas previously it wouldn’t work.

To enable SSL connections to an external database for existing sites you can add the following lines to your site’s wp-config.php file:

define( 'DB_SSL', true );
define( 'MYSQL_CLIENT_FLAGS', MYSQLI_CLIENT_SSL );

If you followed our guide for setting up a managed database with DigitalOcean or AWS Lightsail, you can rest assured that the connection between your site and database was within an internal network and therefore has been secure all along. Still, we recommend adding an extra layer of security by enabling SSL connections.

Previously, the SpinupWP CLI tool was not functional on newer versions of PHP (8.1 and 8.2). Users would encounter deprecated errors on a number of dependencies when running the CLI.

We’ve now updated the CLI functionality to work on PHP 8.1 and 8.2 as it does on other versions of PHP. SpinupWP PHP SDK dependencies have also been updated to the latest version.

Previously, for users to download a copy of a backup, they needed to log in to their storage provider separately, find the backup, and then download it from there. There was no way to download the backup from within the SpinupWP dashboard.

We’ve added buttons to the Backups table in the dashboard to download a backup of the database and/or a backup of the files. This now works with all storage providers supported by SpinupWP.

Previously, all backups on Amazon S3 storage providers were uploaded using the S3 Standard storage class. This class is designed for frequent access and includes a level of redundancy not required for backups. It’s possible to use lifecycle rules to change the storage class after uploading, however Amazon doesn’t allow you to change the storage class of an object for the first 30 days.

We’ve now added a dropdown for Amazon S3 storage providers allowing you to choose which storage class you’d prefer to use. For an overview of the different classes that are available, you can see Amazon’s S3 Storage Classes doc.