The Bring Your Own Server add-on allow you to use any server at any cloud provider – even if we don’t directly support the provider. You can even use bare-metal servers.
However, the servers must meet our requirements and you might need to exercise a little of your command-line skills in order to initialize the connection to WPCloudDeploy.
Note: even though the add-on is named “Bring Your Own Server”, all the screen elements use “Custom Server” as the label for this feature set.
Using a custom server is a three step process:
Here’s a quick video overview:
The Bring Your Own Server add-on is just a regular WordPress plugin – upload and activate it from the WordPress PLUGINS screen.
Your custom server must meet the following requirements:
The most difficult aspect of these requirements is making sure that the “root” user is configured with an SSH key-pair. If you’re using a cloud-provider such as UpCloud, they can automatically install a key-pair for you (after you’ve uploaded the key-pair to their dashboard). Otherwise you will need to install the key-pair yourself (this article discusses how to install a public key for your root user.)
Once your server meets these requirements, you can follow the section below to connect it to WPCD.
A custom server is treated as if it is it’s own cloud service. When you installed the add-on it added a single new cloud provider in the Cloud Settings screen titled “Custom Server”.
After following the Connecting The Server To WPCloudDeploy section above, you can finally deploy the server. This is done just like any other server.
As long as the server meets the restrictions set out in the Server Requirements section above, the server should be provisioned just like any other cloud server.
To deploy additional custom servers you need to create a virtual cloud provider for each server. Do not try to reuse or change the data in the CUSTOM SERVER provider that you’ve already used – that will break the link to the existing server. Each custom server is treated as if it were a separate and unique cloud provider.
When deploying a custom server, you might see messages such as sudo: unable to resolve host ….
This is usually because the machine name is not set in the Linux configuration files. Assuming your machine name is something like ssdnodes-5ff4a61dd6ce4, you should check the following:
127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.1.1 ssdnodes-5ff4a61dd6ce4
Certain Providers (especially low-end providers) such as ssdnodes and pacificrack do not set some of these entries so you must add them yourself.