Textpattern CMS support forum
You are not logged in. Register | Login | Help
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Field report: Textpattern on NearlyFreeSpeech.net
I’ve set up a hosting account at NearlyFreeSpeech (henceforth NFS). Enticed by the pay-as-you-go pricing model and a need for some USA hosting for clients, I’ve spun up a Textpattern and run the initial setup. This is my field report on the setup process, which is a little different to the processes I’m familiar with. After a couple of false starts, some head-scratching and some “let’s be brave and see if that fixes diagnostics”, I’ve got a green check mark and the site is live.
Initial impressions of NFS are positive. The control panel is functionally capable but visually barebones. Their documentation / FAQs appear to be well-written, but I stalled on a few things because I’m not super familiar with commodity hosting in this current era…but I’ve learned a bunch.
Sign Up & Add Funds
Signing up was easy, no ID needed, and I chose to add 2 factor authentication. When I added my mobile phone for SMS recovery, I was told:
You will receive an SMS with a verification code.
If you are in the US, it will come from 321-420-1498. If you are outside the US or using an SMS gateway service, God only knows what number or alphanumeric sender code it will be from. International SMS is a mess.
Squint your eyes, there’s an element of our Dean in there.
My account was credited with 0.02USD for their “Free Trial” and I chose to add 5USD kick-the-tyres credit. This worked out a little cheaper with PayPal
(0.36USD fee) vs a direct credit card payment (0.55USD fee). As soon as the credit was added, I became much more aware of resource usage – in a good way – which is a little strange considering I’m paying numerous hosting organisations considerably more than 5USD each per month.
Site Setup
Adding a site is straightforward. A domain needs an account ID. When the site is set up, the IP details for DNS are provided. There is an option for on-site DNS, but I went external. Two A + two AAAA records later, the domain homepage resolved. TLS was trivial – there’s a free Let’s Encrypt! certificate for the taking. I didn’t see an option for a third-party certificate, but I’m find with the LE as-is option.
You can choose from various configs of Apache, and your preferred version of PHP. Lovely.
When you add a site (domain), you choose its production status: non-production, production, or critical. This assigns resources / allowances and you’re billed accordingly. Essentially: if you’re earning money from your site, you’re allotted more resource and you’re charged appropriately. While I’m building the site I’ve set up, it’s considered non-production; when it goes live, I’ll switch it to production. More info here. A rough estimate of the site I’m anticipating building (50MiB, Low CPU & RAM, Low database) is set to be about 2USD per month…which is fantastic.
Database Setup
NFS offered me various versions of MariaDB, and no MySQL. This seems to be a trend where hosting organisations are moving away from Oracle. Hetzner cloud hosting don’t offer Oracle MySQL (MariaDB and PostgreSQL only) on their cloud hosting. I do wonder whether MariaDB will the standard go-to when Textpattern 5 is ready…which is an interesting development.
The database setup caught me out, but I eventually figured out the snags. Start by adding a database process (note: not a database), and you’re emailed login credentials for that process. You can add a new database from the control panel, but I couldn’t see anywhere that it was shown to exist within said control panel after it had been created. The solution was to use phpMyAdmin with the emailed credentials, and then the database management was possible. Easy when you know how, eh? I haven’t used phpMyAdmin in anger for some time, and the privileges setup was a bit kludgy. No fault of NFS in that sense, but be patient if you’re coming at this with fresh eyes.
Textpattern Install
A consideration for the Textpattern installer in v5: if the database is to be created during the installer, an option to provide the ‘super’ credentials would be sensible: essentially, what’s the admin account to create the non-admin user, the database, and apply the right privileges.
Another snag that I came up against was the config information not being read correctly when the contents were copy-pasted into config.php but were read correctly when the file was uploaded. That was the first time I’d seen that during an install.
Diagnostics
There were some warnings on the Diagnostics panel, mostly down to permissions. My SFTP app had set files and directories to 0775 as default, where the group and user were the owner of the site, and that threw a permissions error. As a test, I switched the files and directories to 0777 and the errors went away. I’m not convinced this is the right approach, but if anything comes to light during the dev phase I’ll report back.
A nice surprise: NFS are using FreeBSD on this server. I assume they’re also using jails to an extent, so I’m not quite so worried about the 0777 tomfoolery above. Time will tell if I should be.
Wrap Up
That’s all for now, I will eventually get around to dev’ing this site, and I’ll report back on host usability, pricing, service etc.
Offline