So I’ve been learning the Laravel PHP framework for the better part of a year now and integrating it into my professional repertoire little by little. At the same time, I’ve been operating a small company called EPIXIAN with a handful of loyal customers. Part of doing this entailed running a webserver, in part to host my customers’ projects, but mostly to host staging environments and demo sites when I need input from the customer or to make a sale. And to be frank, the hosting income wasn’t really offsetting the amount of time and energy, or actual dollars the server was costing me.
The server itself was being rented from Amazon Web Services, and on top of that, the Plesk software I was using to provision accounts was costing even more each month. But people don’t want to DIY websites anymore it seems, and it was pointless to pay for a service that enabled people to go in and manage their own sites, when most of my customers weren’t interested.
I stumbled across Laravel Forge, which to be honest, looks sleeker and more kitted out from their website than it really is. The documentation is pretty weak, but it does what I want, and the sites themselves seem to be peppier. I even switched back to DigitalOcean in the process.
So there you go. This site, and many others, got, or are getting migrated over to a Forge-provisioned server, and my administration overhead just got a lot smaller as a result.