Hosting models: overview
This section is for product managers and system administrators at hosting companies who decide in which form they offer Exponential: on a shared server, on a virtual or dedicated machine per customer, in containers, on a platform as a service, or as a managed service. It answers what each model means for an Exponential site, what the project's own sources say about it, and which questions to settle before a model becomes a product.
Back to Hosting companies: start here.
Contents
- The pages of this section
- What is the same in every model
- What changes between models
- Where to read next
The pages of this section
| Page | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Choosing a hosting model | One table comparing shared, VPS, dedicated, containers and Kubernetes, with the decisions behind it |
| Shared hosting | Running many customer sites on one machine without shell access or long-running processes for the customer |
| VPS hosting | One virtual machine per customer or per small group of sites, with root access |
| Dedicated servers | A whole physical machine for one customer or one large site, and when that pays off |
| Containers: Docker and Podman | Images, volumes and the one-writer rule for SQLite |
| Kubernetes | Several replicas, shared storage, sessions and a database server |
| Platform as a service | Offerings with a fixed runtime, and what a read-only or ephemeral file system means |
| Managed hosting | Taking over updates, backups, monitoring and security for the customer |
What is the same in every model
Whatever the model, an Exponential site needs the same few things (Chapter 2: Requirements):
- PHP 8.0 or later (Exponential Velocity included) with the required extensions;
- one database of the six supported ones, in the official order: 1. SQLite 3 (the default) · 2. PostgreSQL · 3. MongoDB · 4. MariaDB · 5. Oracle · 6. MySQL. Microsoft SQL Server is known to be possible with additional work at this time; it has no driver in 6.0.x (Database support);
- writable storage for
var/and thesettings/directories the setup writes; - a way to serve HTTP: Exponential Velocity, FrankenPHP through Velocity, or a traditional web server such as Apache or nginx with PHP-FPM (Chapter 8);
- cron, or another scheduler, for
runcronjobs.php(Chapter 10, Cronjobs).
A complete backup in every model is the database and the files var/storage, settings/override and
settings/siteaccess (Backup and restore).
What changes between models
| Question | Why it matters for Exponential |
|---|---|
| May the customer run a long-running process? | Velocity and FrankenPHP need one; Apache or nginx with PHP-FPM do not. "Shared hosting usually will not" allow one (README.md). |
| Is there shell access? | Without it the setup wizard in the browser is the installer (Chapter 4). |
| Is the file system persistent? | var/ holds uploads, caches, logs and, with SQLite, the database itself. |
| Do several machines serve one site? | Then SQLite is out and a database server, shared storage for var/storage and shared sessions are needed (Containers, cloud and hosting panels). |
| Must customers be isolated from each other? | One PHP-FPM pool or one Velocity instance per site, each as its own operating-system user (Chapter 8). |
| Who runs updates and backups? | You, the customer, or both; this is what turns hosting into managed hosting. |
Note
The sources place the hosting models in tiers through the operating system and the panel, not through the model itself: cloud virtual machines "are ordinary Linux machines", tier 2 or 3 by their distribution; Kubernetes and platform-as-a-service offerings are tier 3, "a reasoned expectation, not a test result" (The four tiers).
Where to read next
- Hosting basics: requirements, PHP, the databases in order, permissions, sizing.
- Control panels: Plesk, cPanel, DirectAdmin, ISPConfig, Webmin and the panel tasks.
- Web servers and engines: Velocity, FrankenPHP, Apache, nginx and others.
- Security, especially Multi-tenant isolation.
Related pages
- Hosting companies: start here
- Choosing hosting, database and operating system: the same decision from the project manager's side.
- Operating system support and Database support
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
Become an Exponential Partner
Partners share their information, provide funding, contribute back and develop the products with us, and that is how Exponential grows. A partner website and dashboard are planned for mid-2027: please become a partner today to speed up our growth rate and land new features faster.