fortrabbit blog

Three three-letter acronyms for the new platform — and a skills update that glues them together.

I have built an openly-licensed, ratings-free register of web hosting providers. Why?

Why we left Notion for a folder of Markdown files, and the gotchas we hit along the way.

An early preview of fortrabbit agent skills: plain-text instruction files that teach AI coding assistants how to manage apps.

Building an environment variable editor that handles multiline values, special characters and a base64 helper without feeling clever.

Building RSS feeds for a Nuxt Content blog with fuzzy prompts and little supervision. What the AI got right, and where it went off.

fortrabbit co-founder Frank spends an hour on the SaaS Unbound podcast with Anna Nadeina, talking about bootstrapping hustles.

Five developers, no venture capital, competing with giants. A brain dump on motivation, project management and business philosophy.

The new fortrabbit platform opens in public beta after years of work — a hosting service rebuilt from scratch rather than updated.

Rewriting a hosting platform from scratch is the mistake every essay warns about. Why fortrabbit did it anyway, and how it went.

Hiring at a small company without an applicant tracking system or a hiring manager, and the things that end an application early.

Choosing a billing provider for a hosting platform: the requirements, the candidates, and why a homebrew system finally had to go.

After a decade on AWS, a new platform is a chance to reconsider. How infrastructure providers were evaluated, and against which criteria.

Why a hosting dashboard gets collaboration features that look like a small social network, and what agencies and freelancers do with them.

A post mortem of the September 2023 internal maintenance: what went wrong across the nights in the EU, and what the aftermath was.

Developers reach for the terminal first, so why did a hosting platform for developers start with a graphical dashboard instead?

Ten years of PHP cloud hosting: slow steady growth, hiring difficulties, and an honest account of a quiet period without big features.

The story of one small dashboard security fix: a password form bypassed with browser dev tools, reported by a long-standing researcher.

A critical vulnerability in the Craft CMS plugin SEOmatic. How to check whether an installation was affected, and how to clean up.

What fortrabbit changed in March 2020 to keep client sites online: remote work, shared responsibility and extended documentation.

How our new invoice numbers are structured and what went wrong when we rolled it out.

A post mortem of the 2019 under-the-hood update: a global operating system upgrade that did not go as planned, and why.

The backstory of a week of ImageMagick trouble on the platform: what broke in image transformations, and what was done about it.

GDPR is here. Wat is changing for our clients, what not, why and when.

A collection of Facebook reaction bots found on hosted sites, and the accidental brutalist beauty of their interfaces.

fortrabbit becomes one of the first official Craft CMS hosting partners, after three years of hosting Craft projects on the platform.

Our real-live practices on auto-generated client e-mail communication.

Universal App plans get reworked five months after launch: the entry plan goes, the middle plan takes its price, a top plan arrives.

Why a Drupal 8 install guide took 540 days to write, and what the delay says about writing hosting documentation for a moving target.

What comes after the mission statement: a new hobby line alongside professional hosting, and the migration path for Old App owners.

Password authentication as an alternative to SSH keys, plus documentation code examples that fill in real values while logged in.

Four years of PHP cloud hosting: what New Apps changed, where the company stands, and what the next year is meant to bring.

Remote SSH execution runs artisan and other framework commands directly on the environment, without a tunnel and a special config.

One complicated support ticket about a bounced payment, printed almost in full — on privacy over convenience and disaster communication.

Two-factor authentication arrives for fortrabbit accounts, together with configurable session and sudo timeouts.

Two small dashboard additions: batch importing environment variables from a .env file, and DNS checks on domain setup.

The fortrabbit roadmap after the dashboard relaunch, and the groundwork already laid for the updates that follow it.

Releasing a dashboard that took years to write, then watching how it lands. On feedback, missing features and shipping big projects.

A guide for existing users moving into the new fortrabbit dashboard: what changed, what stayed, and where to find each feature.

A new blog layout on a new engine, and why a static site generator replaced WordPress for a developer-facing company blog.

What actually changes for existing customers when the new fortrabbit dashboard arrives, including the move from freemium to a free trial.

SSL v3 is switched off across the platform in response to the POODLE vulnerability. No action is needed on the client side.

What to expect from the rebuilt fortrabbit dashboard, months before its release: the process, the features and the reasoning.

status.fortrabbit.com becomes the official channel for scheduled maintenance and incidents, with mail, SMS and RSS subscriptions.

An interview with freelance developer Lee Tengum about building offload.io, one of the projects hosted on fortrabbit.

Price cuts for the Memcache, MySQL and Workers add-on plans, and why cloud pricing has not followed Moore's Law so far.

The SMTP wrapper and the ReSync tool are switched off ahead of the new dashboard, with a note on how features reach end of life.

New Relic support lands on fortrabbit under a bring-your-own-license model, with the daemon running on the platform side.

Enhancing our platform with professional & reliable developer to developer support.

The freemium development plan is replaced by a free trial. The reasoning, the timeline, and what it means for existing accounts.

Where the platform stands in late 2013: a new dashboard in the making, what shipped since launch, and what did not.

One year of running a PHP hosting platform: a thank-you to the clients who trusted an unfinished product, and what comes next.

Is freemium the right business model for our service or shall we switch to a free trial model?

Results and learnings from our latest questionnaire among our users with 327 answers.

In May 2013 the fortrabbit platform was successfully attacked. The full account of what happened, what leaked and what changed after.

Two weeks of downtimes in 2013, explained from the inside: what broke, what it meant for a young hosting company, and what changed.

Write protection reduces the privileges of a running app, and it is worth enabling on every production app. Why it took a while to build.

The PHP XSL extension is deployed across the platform, which makes Symphony CMS and its XML and XSLT templates run on fortrabbit.

Our first 4 digits number! Thank you for your interest in our service!

PHP CLI and git become available inside the SSH account, so artisan, the Symfony console and other framework tools run on the server.

fortrabbit shuts down WebRechnung and the remaining MISH services, to put everything behind the new PHP hosting platform.

The fortrabbit roadmap for 2013, written by the person who joined to sit between the technical and the product side of the company.

Permission management arrives: app collaboration for teammates, owner transfer, and the multi-tenancy workflows that come with it.

The fortrabbit roadmap for the coming year, written at the point where a young PHP platform decides what to build next.

Slides and notes from the fortrabbit talk at the Berlin PHP user group, given by the person with the least PHP knowledge in the room.

fortrabbit announces general availability of its PHP hosting platform from Berlin, and the problem it was built to solve.

The private beta of the fortrabbit PHP platform opens and the first invitations go out. What testers can expect during the beta period.

Results of a survey among developers and designers about hosting, workflows and tools — data that was not available anywhere else in 2012.

The first fortrabbit help pages go live, and the search for a knowledge base system that suits a small hosting company.

What became of MISH, the bare-metal hosting platform fortrabbit ran in a Berlin data center before building a PHP cloud service.

A coming-soon page for fortrabbit.com with an HTML5 video background, and a survey asking developers what the platform should be.

The first post on the fortrabbit blog, announcing a next-generation PHP platform built in Europe, and what this blog will be for.