How trialing Caddy lead to us taking over a client’s hosting

Three years ago on a whim I set up a new server and wanted to use this new web server software I had come across called Caddy. I had used Apache when I originally started doing web development since it was easy to use locally using MAMP and other apps, then I switched to NGINX because it was “better”. NGINX worked fine, but I like trying new things, so I got it in my head to try Caddy and it was extremely easy to set up with it’s automatic HTTPS.

After getting it set up on the server I decided to set up a copy on my computer to use for local development, that required Dnsmasq and mkcert. It’s been my local development server solution ever since. I thought this one server and local install was going to be the sum of my Caddy usage. Then I needed to host a client beta and that’s where Caddy really shined.

The beta ran fast, I thought nothing of it because beta’s usually run fast on my servers because they don’t tend to have much else running on them outside of PHP and MySQL. The real surprise came when the beta was migrated to the client’s host who was using Apache. The difference was night and day. The beta was so slow on their Apache set up that they started asking what the difference was. I explained Caddy to them and for the second time since working with this client they asked if Fifty52 would consider offering hosting as a service.

I had never wanted to offer hosting despite having experience with provisioning and configuring servers because I was scared to offer the service despite my experience, so when asked the first time I said no. The second time I jumped at the opportunity because the speed was so different and I had been having a lot of trouble getting their host to upgrade PHP from 7.0.x, install extensions, and generally get back to me in a reasonable time. I wanted to remove the middleman if possible so if an extension needed to be installed I could just install and configure it instead of going back and forth and hoping it got done at some point.

Fifty52 has been hosting this client’s projects ever since. They currently have nine servers running Caddy and we’ve had zero issues with speed, projects are extremely quick to set up, and I am looking forward to learning more about all of the modules and additional directives as their hosting needs evolve.