Posted by mlecha on May 27, 2018 at 4:51pm
Hi,
I'm looking for inexpensive (~25$ a month?) Drupal 8 hosting options that support Composer for a small non-profit?
Currently the organization is on shared hosting at Bluehost, which supports Composer, but requires serving out of public_html, which doesn't play well with Composer's sub-folders.
Helpful tech support would be a bonus. Reliable backups too..
Thanks for any suggestions,
Michael
Comments
DIgitalOcean
I would recommend going with digital ocean.
https://www.digitalocean.com/
They provide small virtual machines for you to setup and run your applications/website off of. They are relatively cheap as well; droplets start at $5 USD.
As for provisioning these boxes, I use a tool called dropfort to create a bash file that will set it all for me.
http://dropfort.com/
Hope it helps.
Managing a VM
If you're going to be managing a VM, you may as well just run Aegir on it. Dropfort looks like something similar to Aegir, but is closed-source/proprietary. Does it have any advantages above and beyond what Aegir, which is open source, does?
Aegir hosting
Given that Aegir now supports Composer, you can try one of the Aegir-based hosting companies offering shared hosting (assuming they're running Aegir 3.14+).
I know about these two:
For enhanced Composer features, they should also be running Aegir Deploy. Not sure if you need any of those deployment strategies though.
Nothing proprietary about Dropfort
There's nothing closed source or proprietary about servers configured with Dropfort thank you very much :-P
Dropfort generates a manifest of configuration which is passed to Puppet (which you can see / copy as needed). Then you run the bash provisioner script as root on the server. It installs Puppet and tells the machine where to look for its desired configuration. Then using open source Puppet modules the server is configured. It works with any dedicated virtual machine (whether it be DigitalOcean or Linode, Azure, whatever). All it does is install the Puppet agent, connects to the Dropfort Puppet master and run the configuration. Once the server is configured you can disable the agent, make your own changes, connect it again, whatever you want. It installs RPM based packages that are well supported on CentOS / RedHat systems. It does other nice things like install Drush Launcher, updates to the latest PHP7 for you, etc. It's all free so doesn't really hurt to try it out. You just have to cover the cost of your server.
In the end you end up with a server that's configured as you like with no dependency to keep it linked to Dropfort. You can come / go as you like.
Note: we primarily test on Enterprise Linux so Ubuntu based machines may not work.
--
Mathew Winstone
CEO/Co-Founder - Coldfront Labs Inc.
http://coldfrontlabs.ca
@mathewwinstone
Comparison to Aegir
Sounds interesting, but I still don't have a good sense of what it can do that Aegir can't. Would you kindly explain?
Apologies for assuming it wasn't open source, but I couldn't find any code, links to code, or a license on the Web site. Please provide this information. I'm quite interested in exploring the product myself, and seeing what it can do in comparison to Aegir, which is what I use for all of my enterprise clients (typically on Debian or Ubuntu LTS, but Aegir can run on any Linux-based VM; you just won't be able to use the Debian package). However, I'm eagerly waiting for your thoughts on this. (Mainly, why something new?)
Are you folks coming to DrupalCamp Montreal? I'm actually doing an Aegir presentation on the Friday at 1330h, and would love to have a conversation about other tools like yours, see where we can collaborate, etc.