GridPane FAQs
- Getting Started Questions
Getting started is easy! Our Core plan is 100% free, and you can find free credit from Vultr over on their coupons page:
https://www.vultr.com/coupons/ (not an affiliate link).
This knowledge base article will walk you through getting a server up and running step by step:
In the near future, all plans will be able to purchase features as addons within their account. You’ll be able to pick and choose the features that you need, and pay as you go.
These plans are no longer available for sign up. However, in the near future you will be able to access all GridPane features via addons.
You can learn more about this change here:
How We Can Be “Off The Market” and Thriving At The Same Time
You can learn more about each plan and their features on the following pages:
1. GridPane Core Plan
2. PeakFreq Managed Servers
3. Bespoke Managed Hosting
As everyone’s websites are different, with different traffic, plugins, themes, admin usage, etc, this is impossible to answer.
However, a good rule of thumb if we’re talking solely about fully cached brochure websites is 7-10 sites per 1GB of RAM. This means you can host roughly 15-20 websites on a 2GB RAM server, and 30-40 on a 4GB RAM server.
Please see this knowledge base article for further information: Getting Started: Choosing Your First Servers and Common Server Questions
The only limits you have on traffic are the ones imposed by the bandwidth limits of your chosen provider.
We never restrict or throttle your visitors and so long as your accounts with your hosting providers stay at or below their established bandwidth limits, you’ll never have to pay overages for too much traffic. All of our default providers have plans that can support many hundreds of thousands, even millions of monthly visitors, for as little as $5/month.
Yes, these are your servers and you will have full root access to them.
- GridPane Features FAQ
We have a TON of security features, too many to list here. A lot of this is active right out of the box, and other features can be configured on a per website basis.
This includes a Web Application Firewall (WAF), Fail2Ban integration, WordPress hardening features, and more.
Numerous resources on securing your websites (including a case study from one of our team on how they secured two websites for a bank) can be found here:
Our paid plans include local and remote backup options that can be configured hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. These backups are:
- Incremental
- Easy to configure right down to the minute of the day
- Can be adjusted on a per site basis
- Downloadable
You can learn more about our backups system here:
https://gridpane.com/kb/v2-
Yes! You can easily create staging websites for any of your live websites, and you can also easily deactivate them when you don’t need them.
You can push back and forth between staging and live, and you can choose to only push files or only database, or you can choose to only push specific database tables.
You can also easily clone your sites, and you can use our cloneover feature to clone one site over another, which is similar to our staging feature.
Our Git integration is currently in beta, with its full production release coming soon.
With it, and you can choose between only managing specific plugins with Git, or managing your whole code base. More details can be found in this intro:
An Overview of GridPane Git Options: Full and Hybrid Repo Types
Right now this is not a part of the service we offer. You can certainly set up load balancing and/or dedicated databases with servers provisioned at GridPane, but we would not be able to support any custom work done to those servers.
We get asked this a lot, but in reality there are very, very few use cases that ever require a load balancer.
When running our server-level page and object caching on a server like Digital Ocean’s premium AMD options, you will get excellent performance. Many people have found that their $1500/month plan sites at their previous managed host run just fine on a $48 4 vCPU core server (results of course vary wildly).
Unless you really need a load balancer to handle massive amounts of traffic, they are generally more complex than necessary to maintain, more expensive than necessary, and don’t provide any real performance benefit.
- Support and other General Questions
Everything that you manage inside of GridPane belongs 100% to you, and you can take them with you and leave GridPane at any time. Each server you connect to GridPane is secured by an outside provider, and your fees and arrangements with them are your business alone. We can’t cancel or revoke your sites, because they’re 100% in your control, always.
Our support team is online 24/7, 365 days a year. We’re an experienced, close-knit team, and we offer support through tickets and our community forum.
Our support is more geared towards WordPress professionals and not individual business owners.
You can learn more about our scope of support here: Scope of Support
Our community forum is also very active, and you can get assistance and advice from both our team and others using GridPane to host their sites.
We can only assist with website migrations for our Bespoke managed hosting services.
However, migrating websites is simple, and most popular migration plugins do work with our platform (popular choices are All in One WP Migration and Migrate Guru), and we have several guides in our knowledge base detailing how to migrate a website over to GridPane.
Email Addresses: Email is best handled by specialist email providers. Typically our customers use GSuite or Outlook 365 as they’re the biggest and most reliable. We strongly recommend that you don’t provide email services to your clients as there is very little money to be made, and any issues that occur can be extremely costly for both you and your clients.
Transactional Email: You will need to set up a transactional email service to handle WordPress emails (form submissions, password resets, etc). We integrate directly with SendGrid for this, but there are many excellent, inexpensive solutions such as Postmark, Mailgun, Sendinblue, Amazon SES, etc, that can be configured with a plugin such as FluentSMTP.
- Payment Questions
You’ll be charged each month, or annually, on your renewal date.
All of your sites and servers will remain just as they were before when they were connected to your GridPane account. Certain features and functionality that are delivered by the GridPane service will immediately cease to function (backups, staging, UpdateSafely™ and so on). However, your sites should continue to perform just as before and you won’t experience any outages. You’ll need to make other plans for their management and upkeep.
GridPane plans are a flat monthly or yearly fee.
As we’re the software and support side of hosting, you will also need to pay for your servers that you connect to our service. These payments are made directly to the server provider and not to GridPane.
- GridPane Core Plan FAQ
Yes, GridPane Core is a real thing, and it’s free to use (you still need to pay for your servers at Vultr though).
When we first launched GridPane we had a Free Forever plan, which proved unsustainable because of the support burden created by the segment of users. We’ve ultimately figured out how to solve for that: the only support available for Core users is from the community. There’s hundreds of pages of documentation, covering every imaginable use case. The GridPane platform now powers more than 100K websites. It’s incredibly robust, secure, and highly performant.
Our ideal clients are larger agencies who are spending many hundreds or thousands of dollars per month on their hosting needs. But everyone has to start somewhere. The people signing up for GridPane Core today are the future of the WordPress ecosystem. We don’t want price to be the barrier that stops ambitious WordPress developers from learning about the insanely cool set of tools that we’ve built here at GridPane.
It’s fairly straightforward: we make a little bit of money when you choose to sign up to certain infrastructure providers that we have integrated into the platform. And we’ve eliminated all of the costs associated with supporting these free accounts. Our support team is still standing by 24/7 in the (unlikely) event of any issues with the application or our stack. Core users are encouraged to enroll in the various educational pathways that we’ve built across our documentation and our knowledgebase.
GridPane Core is a restricted set of tools, without support, and with a limit of 25 sites. If you don’t need any of our more advanced features (like remote backups, staging functionality, cloning tools, advanced security and performance settings etc) then Core may be sufficient for you. Almost all paid users are currently using one or more features which are not available in Core.
One of the most common things that we hear new users of GridPane say is “What if I don’t know anything about servers?” And our answer is always the same: You don’t need to know anything about servers or systems administration. A little bit of knowledge definitely doesn’t hurt, but everything you need to know is all laid out within the onboarding videos and your various welcome/getting started emails. If you can just follow along our initial instructions will have you rolling within as little as 15 minutes. And if you get stuck for any reason, you can likely get unstuck just by running through our Top Ten list.
People who are completely new to self-managed WordPress can get started in minutes using Core connected to an inexpensive server from Vultr or DigitalOcean.
Smash Your Hosting Problems Once & For All
WordPress pro’s from all over the world are moving their most important, high-traffic websites to GridPane. Why not take us for a test drive? You can get started today for free!