To be able to operate Bloxby on your own server, the server will need to meet the following requirements:

• LAMP Stack server: Linux/Unix + Apache + MySQL + PHP
• The Apache web server will need to have the module “mod_rewrite” and “mod_headers” enabled
• Disabling of the mod_security module is advised (when using versions 1.0.6 or below)
• MySQl should be version 5.5.3 or newer
• PHP should be version 5.4 or newer ≤ 7.4.
• PHP should be using the newer MySQLi extension (the older MySQL extension might work but is not supported)
• PHP CURL, GD and mbstring extensions must be installed
• The PHP ZipArchive class and allow_url_fopen directive must be loaded
• The PHP module php-ssh2 is needed for sFTP uploading (when not available, the sFTP option will be hidden)
• Using any sort of server-side caching like Varnish can prevent the application from working properly and is not advised.
• Using Nginx as a reversed proxy can prevent the application from working properly and is not advised.

Hosting types

Although the basic Bloxby functionality will work on cheaper shared hosting, some of the publishing features won’t work properly, particularly publishing on custom domains. Therefore, we advise customers to run Bloxby on either a VPS or a fully dedicated server. To make full use of the publishing functionality, it is important that your server is using a dedicated IP address and not a shared one.

DNS and SSL

Since Bloxby allows end-users to publish their websites on subdomains of your main application domain, we advise you to setup your infrastructure in such a way that allows for automatic SSL for your subdomains. To this end, we recommend hosting your DNS with Cloudflare, since they offer basic SSL for both the main domain name as well as subdomains.

Preferred hosting company

We usually advise Bloxby customers to use Digital Ocean as the hosting provider (please note Bloxby is in no way affiliated to Digital Ocean; we simply think they’re awesome).

Hosting control panels

We do not recommend using  WHM/cPanel as your server’s control panel. The main reason being that using WHM/cPanel creates some issues when using custom domain publishing (you will manually need to add every individual domain to cPanel for the publishing to function properly). If you’re not planning on using the custom domain publishing functionality, you can safely use a WHM/cPanel server to host Bloxby.
We can recommend using VestaCP. It is a free control panel, which will not create issues running Bloxby.

Free installation service

If you have purchased the Professional package or the Enterprise package and you’re looking to use our free installation service, we recommend you set up a Digital Ocean droplet (it’s fine to start with the 2GB config; you can easily upgrade to higher specs later when needed).