@doug @RiFi2k what do you think of free services like serverpilot?
@lalo I’ve not used ServerPilot, but I did take a look at it a year ago.
IMHO, the $10/mo package doesn’t do quite enough to host client’s live sites on, and the $49/mo package doesn’t even come close to what I get for a fully managed, HA environment, with DR, with a 24*7 engineering team who specialise in WordPress and are pro-actively monitoring for health issues and optimising performance, managing server updates, and have my environment behind DDoS protection, load balancers, CDN and a heap of other stuff…
But the buzzwords and acronyms I’ve just listed above, were the reason I signed up. It’s the WFF (warm fuzzy feeling - couldn’t help but create another acronym) that means I stay with them - I simply am not looking over my shoulder, worrying about a late night call from a client asking WTF is going on. I just know that whatever I throw at the host, they just handle it.
I do have to state that the only reason I get that at a comparable price to that of ServerPilot’s is because although I am on a large capacity cluster, I now have enough clients on there to bring the price per site down - but even without that, it’s possible to get (IMO) a better offering than the $49/mo option for $20-30/mo, depending on requirements.
Objectively speaking, I think ServerPilot (or maybe even DO on it’s own w/ Trellis) would be sufficient for small businesses that perhaps didn’t accept payment online; if the server did go down for a few hours while Server Pilot fixed something, or you had to restore from backup or move the site because of a DDoS attack - it wouldn’t impact the client’s business enough for them to start wanting to recoup lost revenue from you…
@doug Are there any specific services you recommend for managed WordPress hosting around that $20-$30 range? Right now I’m on a shared host and am pretty disappointed with the service.
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Hi @christianmagill - yep - https://pressidium.com/pricing/ 
These are our partners for hosting, and they’re outstanding.
Thanks for the viewpoints and the info, everyone. Good stuff to consider and think about!
@doug I’m personally not interested in maintaining my own VPS but I want the consistency of the dev/staging/prod environment through bedrock/trellis. Is this what pressidium.com supports?
Hi @lvl99
Actually, it’s strange how things can change - Although for a few months things were great, I had a very bad experience in the end with Pressidium - they really let me down. There were a number of issues with their caching solution that kept breaking checkouts so I had some seriously unhappy customers and I felt I was looking over my shoulder all of the time.
Also, they promised a bespoke solution for getting Trellis deploys to work if I were to upgrade to their ‘Enterprise’ package (I forget how much this was exactly, but it was something like $400 - 500/month), only for it to never materialise. It was just one of those situations where they just went quiet, and no evidence whatsoever of them doing anything - so I feel massively duped.
I don’t think I can edit my previous post, but I simply cannot recommend Pressidium anymore.
I’ve since moved to Kinsta, and they’ve not missed a beat. The sites are lightening quick, support is nearly instant, and I’m saving a lot of money compared to the Enterprise package (which actually I didn’t need, other than for the bespoke solution to be implemented).
I think I saw @JulienMelissas post something on Twitter a while back about how he’s either got Bedrock or even full Trellis deploys working on Kinsta - but I’ve not yet tried myself! I will certainly post back when I find the time to try it out… or perhaps me pinging him will get his attention!
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For users like myself who want to run/manage max 2 sites from a single trellis, Kinsta could support this? I’ll have a look into it, thanks for your help @doug
Oh hai actually it’s @nathanielks who’s showed me how to do it, although I haven’t actually put it into practice quite yet… sorry.
@doug@lvl99 I don’t see why you couldn’t host 2 sites or so! Trellis is used for local development and then for deploying code. We don’t actually provision anything on Kinsta.
Hi @nathanielks If you have time would you be able to share your deployment configuration/workflow on Kinsta? Did they have to change their default setup to make it work or does it work on a standard account? I’m not that familiar with TreIlis and have traditionally used Capistrano for deployment. From what I can tell the deployment strategy is similar. Kinsta weren’t keen to change things when I enquired about the possibility of setting the web root to the current symlink. Cheers!
Indeed! I got around that by creating a bedrock folder in the account’s home dir, and then symlinking the current release to public on Kinsta. You’ll need to ask them to add the bedrock folder to their open_basedir php ini setting, but once that’s done you’re good to go!
I don’t have time at the moment, but I’ll put something up here when I get a chance 
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Thanks, that’s great
Sorry for the wait, @superbiaweb @lvl99 @max! These are the files I shared with @JulienMelissas: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1zycLinPP-LRTduaTdEaHFJUms. You should be able to decompress that and drop it on your trellis directory to overwrite the necessary files. Or (cautious alternative) open the files to see what’s inside
Then you need to add these variables:
group_vars/all/main.yml:
project_root: "{{ kinsta_path }}"
group_vars/staging/main.yml:
kinsta_root: "/www/HOME_DIRECTORY"
kinsta_path: "{{ kinsta_root }}/bedrock"
group_vars/production/main.yml:
kinsta_root: "/www/HOME_DIRECTORY"
kinsta_path: "{{ kinsta_root }}/bedrock"
You’ll need to change HOME_DIRECTORY in the above references to the actual value. Same for files/wp-cli.yml. You can find it in the path under the “Basic Details” section in the Kinsta dashboard.
This assumes you create a folder on Kinsta called /bedrock. You’ll need to ask Kinsta to add that path to their open_basedir configuration for you. Other than that, this should work.
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I am giving this a try now
On the subject of maintaining servers, and I can’t remember if this has been suggested before, would it make any sense for Trellis to add/keep an additional playbook that runs updates and reboots?
Like ./bin/update.sh production example.com?
That would make it easy to incorporate into a regular WordPress maintenance schedule, which I already do approximately monthly for my clients.
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It’s not uncommon for servers to be online for months or possibly a year+ without a reboot. However in today’s idea of servers being so expendable and replaceable, I think that requirement is rather moot (unless you get to work on a legacy app like I do). I would think that unless there is a security patch that’s required, or something goes wrong, these servers that Trellis provisions are more or less set and forget, and if something happens, provision another one.
I guess I just always see my servers complaining of pending updates, or “needing to be rebooted” when I ssh to them.
I haven’t actually had a problem though.
Same.
I’ve had to set myself a task to routinely check-in on my servers. Tempted to roll all my simpler Roots installs into one server, when I get the time.
Separate servers for each site saves you from the typical “bad neighbor” issues shared hosts get. Email blacklists, etc.
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Yeah I’m still weighing up the pros/cons.
For emails in particular I only use SendGrid anyway so my Trellis servers never send anything.