The Cloud VPS series explains how we run hundreds of PHP/Laravel websites on the Balancer – Minion – Database model: Nginx reverse proxy, multiple PHP versions, multi-tenant MySQL, SSL, automation with Jenkins, security ...
Before a website goes live on its real domain, it usually has a demo version where the site owner reviews the design, QA runs tests, and performance is measured. The demo runs on a subdomain such as *...
A small operations team cannot sit and watch dozens of Cloud VPS instances all day. Nginx or PHP-FPM dies at midnight, a queue worker falls into the FATAL state, a disk slowly fills up: these incident...
As described in the opening article of this series, MySQL servers on small Cloud VPS instances usually run without binlog and without replicas. In that setup, the safety of all your data rests on exac...
Once a cluster has dozens of Cloud VPS instances, the volume of repetitive daily operations is large: creating sites, deploying code, changing domains, running backups, removing sites, running an arti...
When you need to build or rebuild a whole batch of Cloud VPS instances (balancers, minions, databases, operations hosts), installing the operating system by hand on each one is slow and hard to keep c...
Most traffic on a content website comes from anonymous readers opening the home page, category pages and article pages. For every one of those requests, Laravel still boots the framework, runs dozens...
Putting a new Laravel website on Cloud VPS by hand is a long chain of steps: create the database, clone the code, edit .env, run composer, write the nginx config file on the minion and then on the bal...
In a multi-site model on Cloud VPS, every site runs over HTTPS and the certificates live on the balancer tier. With hundreds of domains and Let's Encrypt certificates that only last 90 days, renewing...
PHP 7.4 is the last branch of PHP 7, and its security support ended in late 2022. On many Cloud VPS clusters it still runs a fair number of websites, alongside a group of even older sites on PHP 7.2,...
In the database tier of a multi-website setup on Cloud VPS, each server typically runs one MySQL 8.0 instance holding dozens of schemas for dozens of different websites. The server has only a few GB o...
A single Cloud VPS cluster typically holds legacy websites that only run on PHP 7.2, new Laravel sites that need PHP 8.x, and many sites in between on PHP 7.4. Upgrading everything to one version is n...
In a multi-website setup on Cloud VPS, every request passes through one door: the balancer tier. These are the only servers with public IPs, and they run an Nginx reverse proxy that decrypts HTTPS, bl...
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