A list of the open source services and systems we use to run S4 Sustainable Hosting.
At S4 we believe in accountability, transparency, and we are passionate about open source software. We also believe in a lot of other things, but those are the most relevant to this document. We have chosen to make this list publicly visible so you can see how we are running and constantly developing our hosting platform. Some people might argue that this is a bad idea for 'security through obscurity' reasons, but we disagree.
Just a little side note: We believe that everyone should be using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) but that everyone should also understand that the Free in FOSS should refer to liberty and not always to price. If you do use FOSS programs in place of commercial ones then please consider supporting those project, either financially or with time and contributions.
Our main services are all hosted at the sustainable Telia Helsinki Data Centre, with backups and utilities hosted at a sustainable Interxion data centre in Amsterdam.
- Our web servers are Debian or AlmaLinux and run a mixture of Nginx, OpenLitespeed or LiteSpeed Enterprise web server, with Cyberpanel as a control panel.
- Our mail servers are Ubuntu and are running our customised version of Mail-in-a-box.
- Our analytics servers are AlmaLinux, running OpenLiteSpeed and Matomo analytics.
- Our utilities server running various monitoring services is Ubuntu and runs Statping as an uptime monitor.
NOTE: Most of our servers were previously running on CentOS 8. When it reached an early EOL and changed to CentOS Stream, we made the decision to put Debian and AlmaLinux at the centre of our new infrastructure changes, because of the organisation, community and principles that empower them, and their lack of any kind of corporate ownership. We also really love OpenSUSE Leap.
We believe that the F in FOSS doesn't have to mean monetarily free. That's why we have started making monthly donations to these selected open source projects via Open Collective:
- The PHP Foundation
- Flarum
- Matomo Analytics
- FOSSBilling
Matomo - https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo
For all of the obvious data privacy and ownership reasons we don't use Google Analytics or similar, so instead we install ethical analytics on our own sustainably hosted servers. There are a few options, Matomo is the best we've found so far.
We maintain our own Matomo Tracking plugin for S4 Hosting clients.
Statping - https://github.com/statping/statping
We want to love Statping so much, it's the uptime monitor and status page generator that we are using at the moment, but it's not quite where we would like it to be. At the time of this update, no commits have been merged to Statping for about 9 months, there is a fork at https://github.com/statping-ng/statping-ng which might be worth checking out if you want to love it the way we want to.
We are VERY open to suggestions for an actively maintained alternative.
Mail in a Box - https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox
Running and maintaining a mail server with high deliverability is hard and time consuming, but at least you can make sure that setting one up is quick, easy and done right. We love MIAB and it's what we use as a base for all of the mail servers. MIAB is actively maintained, focused, and just gets better and better.
Open LiteSpeed - https://github.com/litespeedtech/openlitespeed
LiteSpeed is great, both OLS and Enterprise LSWS. They are what all of our web servers run on. It's not a decision that we took lightly, having run tests on Apache and Nginx as well, but one that had a clear winner for us.
CyberPanel - https://github.com/usmannasir/cyberpanel
Is CyberPanel perfect, is each update entirely free of bugs, is it more fully featured than all of the other control panels out there, and is the UI beautiful? No, to all of those. It is developing very quickly with devs who do actually listen, becoming more stable and feature-rich all the time, and is the native control panel for LiteSpeed, which makes it an obvious choice for us.
For non-LiteSpeed servers, we use a modified version of ISPConfig. It's far from flawless, it lacks things that many people would consider essential (like a file manager) but it does support administrating multiple servers from one installation, and it is definitely one of the best open source solutions to start from.
Cieloj doesn't actually exist yet, but it is a work in progress, at the planning stages at least. Cieloj is our own new open source control panel system, which we plan to deploy across all of our servers at some point in the future. The best of CyberPanel, the best of ISPConfig, light on resources and with a clear and intiuive interface.
Sometimes projects get old and fade away, and sometimes they stay relevant and work for what seems like forever. Bind might be pretty ancient these days but it is still one of the best possible options out there when it comes to running DNS servers.
We run several of our own sites on WordPress as well as develop WP sites for clients, and offer managed WP hosting. Is it a perfect CMS, is it the fastest, is it x, is it y? No, probably not, but it does power a massive percentage of the web for a reason and it has an ecosystem around it which makes it infinitely flexible. Oh, and for the record, we love Gutenberg.
You can also find a list of the WP plugins that we love (and why) here: https://github.com/S4-Hosting/WordPress-Plugins-we-love
MainWP - https://github.com/mainwp/mainwp
We administer a lot of WordPress sites and we've built our own process and system for keeping tabs on updates, security issues, backups, etc. across our own and clients' sites. At the core of that process we are using MainWP, which is the best solution we've found for remotely administering multiple WP installations.
We maintain our own fork of the MainWP Child plugin for S4 Hosting clients.
Flarum - https://github.com/flarum
Flarum is modern forum software, similar in many ways to Discourse but written in PHP and much less resource hungry, it's lightweight, fast and extensible. It is currently our go-to forum solution for client sites.
We love Flarum!
To start with there are a whole slew of interesting analytics options. We like Matomo, we use Matomo, but some of these seem pretty great too...
Open Web Analytics - https://github.com/Open-Web-Analytics/Open-Web-Analytics
We really like the look of OWA but haven't found the time to thoroughly test it out yet.
Plausible Analytics - https://github.com/plausible/analytics/
Another really interesting ethical analytics solution that we need to find the time to test out thoroughly.
Written in Go, Pirsch is yet one more light and privacy-focused analytics option.
Shynet - https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet
Shynet is possibly the most interesting to us of the analytics options that we want to investigate more very soon.
There are also interesting alternative status monitors...
Cachet - https://github.com/CachetHQ/Cachet
Cachet was great status page software, but unfortunately hasn't been updated for a few years.
Okazanta - https://github.com/Okazanta/Okazanta-core
Okazanta is a new fork of the currently unmainted Cachet. It's just starting out but we have high hopes for it.
Uptimon - https://github.com/RatherLogical/Uptimon
Seemed like a promising status page solution, but seemingly abandoned and completely removed from GH and other sites.
Uptime Kuma- https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma
A pretty new option that is under active development and looking more useful and interesting all of the time. It might not be there and able to everything we need right now, but it's getting there.
Statping-NG - https://github.com/statping-ng/statping-ng
Fork of Statping, which aims to fix issues and build on the original project, which currently seems to be largely unmaintained.
Plus various other projects...
Our chosen mail server solution comes bundled with RoundCube which is pretty bulletproof and stable and just works, but SOGo is a much prettier option that also seems to have some great functionality and be stable regularly maintained. If we were going to jump to another webmail/groupware client, this would probably be the one.
Caddy - https://github.com/caddyserver/
The world of web servers gets a bit murkier once you step outside of the Apache / Nginx / LiteSpeed bubble, but there are a lot of other options out there. Caddy is one of them, it's not so known, not widely used, not suitable out of the box for applications like shared hosting, and doesn't have a GUI. Apart from those things it seems great though, taking a deeper dive is on the to-do list.
YunoHost - https://github.com/YunoHost
YunoHost is a really interesting project, an alternative to more traditional hosting control panels that it mainly targetted at people self-hosting. We haven't looked at it very much but it is supported by some organisations that we have a lot of respect for.
FOSSBilling - https://github.com/FOSSBilling/FOSSBilling
We don't actually use any of the usual billing/automation solutions, i.e. WHMS, Blesta. Instead, we use our own solution that works for us but quite honestly could be better and that we are spending a lot of time improving. If there was a reliable, secure open source alternative that we could use to build on then that would be wonderful, but right now there isn't.
What there is, is FOSSBilling. This is a new fork of the old BoxBilling project. The BoxBilling project has been effectively dead for a long time now despite very valiant efforts to revive it. The only real solution to be able to drive the project forward and create something modern, well maintained, and works was to create a whole new project and brand forked from the original. That is what has now happened and FOSSBilling is the result.
It's still early and we wouldn't consider using it for production right now, but the direction is great, there is active discussion and development, and there are very bright hopes for the future.
We try to contribute to the open source community where we can.
When we create something that is a fork of an existing project, then we follow the existing licensing rules where we have to, i.e. GPL software.
On the other hand, when we create something of our own or continue with a project that gives us the freedom to change the license then we are now using the Climate Strike License for everything. See https://github.com/climate-strike/license
Climate Strike Software is software that uses the Climate Strike License, a software license that developers can use to prohibit the use of their code by applications or companies that threaten to accelerate climate change through fossil fuel extraction.