How Philanthropy.gr took control of server management with ease

Philanthropy.gr began by offering web design & development, and this still remains an integral part of our everyday joy. Initially, we thought that good infrastructure would be the easy part to solve. The plan was to leave infrastructure to a managed service from another company while we'd focus on design and development.

That was 10 years ago. Today, we know very well that a great managed service at a good price is not so easy to find.

Previous challenges

We only use Linux in the company and, in fact, had done so for years even before the company was established. Since we had extensive experience with Linux, we wanted to take full control of our servers. With that goal in mind, we decided to move on to an unmanaged service.

We evaluated all the popular and famous, huge and small providers of unmanaged cloud servers and after extensive testing we chose UpCloud. We simply tried the cloud and dedicated servers available and found UpCloud to offer a better service.

It took us 18 months to decide that all our infrastructure should be on UpCloud. We still have servers with other providers, not only because a client selects a location not available by UpCloud, but also because we want to be current with the ongoing evolution of the industry. We believe in keeping our eyes open to what the future might look like and it quickly became obvious we had picked the right course of action.

Test hosting on UpCloud!

Hosting on UpCloud

Our web design clients soon spread the word and we started getting more clients specifically for our web hosting services. Thankfully, data centres around the globe allowed us to work with clients anywhere in the world. Following our early success, we launched managedlinuxservers.com at the end of 2017 and that is already 2 years ago.

We mainly employ our cloud servers for website hosting and primarily work with Frankfurt, Chicago, and London data centres. We also offer to host custom private e-mail servers. For these, we have only happy clients on UpCloud.

Our hosting options include all the popular choices such as WordPress, Magento, Joomla, and other PHP based CMS. As for other technologies, we use Apache, MariaDB, Postfix, Dovecot, bind, ProFTPD, nginx, Memcached, Redis, Varnish, PHP, Python, and CentOS.

Improvements

We have switched from offering 5 major providers to exclusively UpCloud and back to 3 to 5 providers, depending on the requests, especially for locations. We also offer a server management service for any server on any provider.

UpCloud continues to be our first choice and our only suggestion in proposals. Why? Other providers are not fast, are they not so reliable? Is Upcloud so perfect? Well, check the network, restart a server, use it for a year, and count the incidents. Do that and see for yourself.

We offer web hosting and server management - and we have found UpCloud to be the fastest and the most reliable for our use. Our experiment to take up our own servers simply lead to faster websites, better uptime, versatility, freedom and security. It was not a surprise, but for the little effort, it was somewhat a pleasant revelation.

Future plans

For the foreseeable future, we plan to continue growing together with our customers.