Update 2020: I’ve moved on from spinupwp.com to fireupwp.com and wpclouddeploy.com. This site is now managed with Fireupwp.com so check ’em out!
I’ve been playing with WordPress for quite a few years now but never built my personal site with it. It was always on the todo list and so for the past few years, my personal site has been hosted by weebly.
The motivation for actually transitioning the site to WordPress came in the form of an email announcement from the folks over at deliciousbrains. These guys are kick-a$$ WordPress developers so when they announced their new developer-focused hybrid WordPress hosting service, I figured I could test it out with a new personal website created in WordPress.
Their service, called spinupwp.com (and still in beta), is on track to match the features of cloudways, but with the distinct advantage that you control the underlying resources.
What Is It?
spinwupwp.com allows power-users and developers to easily host WordPress sites on cloud platforms such as Digital Ocean and Amazon Web Services.
But this service comes with a twist!
One that is very friendly to users that care about owning their own stuff.
While there are many services out there that allow you to create WordPress websites on commercial cloud services such as AWS, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Services , none of them allow you to directly access the underlying components on these services. So if you quit the WordPress hosting service, you lose access to any underlying servers and other components they might have created for you.
spinupwp.com offers a way around this. The servers and other components that are created are done so in YOUR cloud-services account. This means that you are billed directly by the cloud service for resources consumed with no mark up. And that you can easily move away from spinupwp.com if you wish.
Features
When a server is provisioned, the default cloud service is Digital Ocean. Add a Digital Ocean TOKEN from your personal Digital Ocean account and spinupwp.com will create the server inside your account.
You can create a fresh server on other cloud services manually and then provide the server account information to spinwupwp.com. So, its less convenient to use them right now. But if your preference is for something other than digitalocean, there is one additional benefit to trying out spinupwp.com – even if you have to manually create your server on your preferred cloud service: You can quickly install and manage secure WordPress sites without paying for a control panel like Plesk or cpanel!
After the server is created, you can add one or more sites to it. Each site is provisioned with security best practices and performance in mind. This includes caching via Redis and a proprietary spinwupwp.com cache plugin, sftp access restricted to certificates, each site’s files owned by separate users and more.
What’s Missing?
I find all of this a highly compelling proposition. And would move all my projects here except for a couple of critical missing features.
As a service still in beta, some things are either missing or not quite up to snuff. In particular, backups. You are ultimately responsible for your own backups.
Most other hosting services will create a full server backup or site backup for you once per day.
With spinupwp.com, you don’t get that at all. You are responsible for your own. While they allow you to turn on whatever the default backup service is for the underlying cloud service, this is not enough.
So, for now, only my personal site is hosted with spinupwp.com. I can do without this site being up. But for more mission-critical applications, its not ready yet.
There is another open issue – who manages updates and installs for the underlying OS components? I am not quite sure yet if that is the spinwupwp.com service or if you have to manually log into your server and run the update routines for the OS and other components. If its the latter, then that’s a huge draw-back for me – the last thing I need is yet another item on my todo list!
Wrap Up
Spinupwp.com is a very promising service. One that I plan to use for almost everything I do in WordPress – once the backup issue is resolved. Hopefully, they will also take care of the normal updates to the software stack as well.
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