Introduction:

In Part II of this series, we covered services that offer a custom pagebuilder as a part of their web hosting. In part III, we will discuss pagebuilders that are in the form of desktop apps. This is an interesting category in itself.

Most of the apps are for Windows or Mac. In particular, we will cover two of these: Mobirise and Pinegrow.

The below reviews for Mobirise and Pinegrow have been written by @Ympker, with inputs from me, @vyas, as applicable.

In addition there are pagebuilders like Publii and Pagekit which can be installed on Linux as well. And one particular "pagebuilder with a twist" that I use: and Reboo. In a subsequent post, we may cover these rather interesting apps. But for now, let us dive into the desktop apps.

Mobirise

Mobirise - HTML&CSS + Bootstrap Page Builder Software

What, now, is Mobirise?

Mobirise is actually a piece of software, or a desktop app. This is in contrast to themes or pagebuilders like Divi that are web browser-based. It requires the installation of a Desktop client either for Windows or Mac. Furthermore Mobirise is not a WordPress pagebuilder but instead a Drag&Drop Pagebuilder GUI Software that outputs pure HTML&CSS Code and comes with templates & blocks based on Bootstrap 4. The content it outputs is super mobile friendly and you can publish your project locally, to FTP, Github Pages and other solutions which is super convenient

Features of Mobirise

Here is a short preview of the blocks you can choose from and the respective block categories covered (see list to the right on the image below the GIF). Once you dragged the block of choice to the canvas it's just exchanging the sample content with your own (media/text) and adjust some styling parameters:

Blocks in Mobirise

It is worth mentioning that it is really convenient that Mobirise integrates flawlessly with royalty-free stock image site "Pixabay" making it easy to import required media for your projects

There is some other gimmicks worth mentioning making for a useful addition:

addition of blocks like calendar and maps

Pricing:

As for the pricing, you can the Mobirise core functions entirely for free. Personally, I haven't paid a dime for Mobirise (so far). You can, however, browse through several plugins and HTML Templates that could make life even easier (it is already easy enough, believe me). Usually when you look at the prices of single templates (some 40-50$ usually) you will quickly realize that it may be more profitable to purchase the AIO kit (all templates&plugins) for some 100-200$ (depending on the sale). There are a lot of cool templates and plugins and you could very well find some worth for your money there.

What I didn't like in particular about buying Mobirise AIO kit, is that it only entitles for updates for 1 year before you need to pay again. With the pricing being at 150-200$ most of the times I can't compare it to other Lifetime Deal pagebuilders though and Divi and Hestia Pro (Theme Isle), as well as AstraWP sell on similar pricing on sale and that's on a license with lifetime updates (ofc these are all WP page builders/themes but still..).

While I don't mind if after one year I won't get any template updates or new templates, things become a bit more problematic with some plugins: The "HTML/CSS Editor" plugin (69$ plugin only or included in AIO Kit) takes care of one of the features I am missing the most in the free core builder and I'd almost consider it essential: Editing the HTML/CSS code live in the program (by simply selecting a block). It also removes all "Mobirise" backlinking in the HTML code (this is not so important for me tbh).

HTML Editor im Mobirise

I wouldn't mind paying for that plugin but if after 1 year they change Mobirise software in a way that requires an update for the plugin to properly work again, I'd have to purchase it again. Same with some other plugins.

My experience using Mobirise:

I will keep this one short. Overall, Mobirise does a great job in allowing you to quickly build a mockup HTML+CSS Bootstrap powered website in little to no time. The code it outputs and the website's performance appears to be clean and the "automagic" in terms of mobile compatibility for websites created with Mobirise is great. The tools available to you (such as Pixabay integration and Cookies alert) are a nice addition to ease your workflow. The little shortcomings it has don't really justify for being called "Cons". Go, give it a shot. The following image shows a mockup webhost one-page site I created in a "build a website in 20 minutes" challenge using Mobirise. While I didn't get as much done as I would have wanted I am still very happy with the result in this time frame:

Potato Hosting Theme/ Site created by @Ympker

Conclusion:

Ultimately, the "Cons" (if they can even be considered Cons at all) for this freely available software gem that is Mobirise are just some nit-picking on my part I believe. Go, give it a try. Pay to support the developers if you love it. It won't be your worst purchase either

As far as I am concerned I make up for the lack of a live Code Editor in the free version of Mobirise by just editing code in Sublime Text and push the update to Mobirise. While this is a little inconvenient it's still doable.

Pinegrow Web Editor - HTML & CSS Website Builder

What, now, is Pinegrow?

Pinegrow is a bit different than your average Pagebuilder in the sense that it isn't really a pagebuilder. Let me explain below. Because it is that different and maybe kind of hard to grasp by just explaining it shortly, I'll leave the following video here as a starting point. It's up to you to decide if you want to continue reading without it or not. For the sake of getting a better idea of what Pinegrow is, I recommend doing so.

Video: Introduction to Pinegrow

You may or may not have seen the above video. But it can probably be said that Pinegrow is targeting a rather "advanced" audience. That audience is Developers, so to speak. Pinegrow is built for Frontend usage, and it focuses on HTML and CSS. Oh, and you can also quite easily create WordPress themes with Pinegrow, define editable areas etc... (I won't go into detail here).

Getting started with Pinegrow

Three ways to use Pinegrow Website builder

Basically, when you start up Pinegrow, there are 3 main ways you can proceed. I will explain these, mention some features along the way, and then continue with the Pricing.

a) Starting a new project from scratch

b) Editing an existing website/project

c) Importing a site

Let us take a look at each of these options in detail

a) Starting a new project from scratch

If you choose this option, you will be presented with the following prompt:

Once you have picked your poison, you can then proceed to "building" your website. Again, however, Pinegrow is different than other Pagebuilders in the following way: The pre-built components/items it offers for Pagebuilding are not made to look fancy or anything. Everything looks rather "professional" and "efficient". This, however, is one of Pinegrow's biggest PROs imho. For a Web Developer that knows his ways around the items/components available are just easy to find and use. I'd even go as far as saying Pinegrow is meant to be used to simplify your coding workflow, not to replace it. It's a back and forth between using the prebuilt items/blocks, hacking your own (Pinegrow live syncs with Atom.io and other Code editors so all edits become immediately visible), and using Pinegrow's powerful toolset to quickly style/edit certain page elements.

Here are some examples of the "List"/"Components" tab when building/editing a website with Pinegrow:

You can always jump right into coding in Pinegrow (if you want to do some small edits you don't need your code editor of choice for). Just click on the are on your website and the respective code will be highlighted in the code box below. This is super convenient. On the right panel, you can also see how you can jump straight to styling.

Styling options in Pinegrow

So, you can definitely quickly build new mockup pages from scratch with Pinegrow if you know your ways around in coding.

b) Edit an existing website/project

You can also open & edit any existing project. Naturally, coding offers way more possibilities than your average Pagebuilder and it wouldn't be fair to compare. That's why I said, Pinegrow is a bit different in the sense that your coding skill and understanding of certain parameters/syntax/properties is highly decisive for the kind of result you can expect with Pinegrow. If you don't fear the code though, Pinegrow makes your workflow much easier (once you get used to it). Obviously I'd rather quickly code a list item than go to components and drag a list, but when it comes to styling or other stuff Pinegrows built-in padding/margin/background/RGB selector/gradients.. are hella fun to play around with!

Here's an example of how an overly crowded Pinegrow panel can look like (I know, I am crazy). Oh, and I don't know if you noticed in the top left, but Pinegrow integrates with Unsplash stock images.

Search and find images directly in Pinegrow.

c) Importing a site

This is one of my favourite features in Pinegrow

Open/import any HTML/CSS based website's frontend via URL. Choose any website you like and learn how it is set up. I had a look at Vultr's website a while ago for example. Of course, you can view the code in chrome dev tools or copy it into any code editor. The thing that makes Pinegrow so great (especially for people learning to code but also advanced users alike) is that it directly shows the connection between a certain website element or area to the code. Click anywhere and the relevant part of the code will be highlighted and relevant modification Parameter/settings will also be shown. Play around, have fun (for example Pinegrow's website).

Pricing

Pinegrow offers three different pricing models

1) Monthly pricing

2) One Time Payment - without interactions

3) Annual subscription - with interactions

We will discuss the pricing options below.

Monthly Pricing

Pricing for monthly plans starts from 11€/month (cheaper on sale). I won't dive much more into this one.

One Time Payment- Without Interactions

This is the plan I am on. Depending on current discounts and license type you will pay between 40-150€. In my opinion, it's your best bet and very affordable at the same time.

The "Pro" version is basically the Pinegrow Core software without the "WordPress theme creator" toolset. If you don't want to have anything to do with WordPress theme creating you can just get that one. If, on the other hand, you'd like to convert your HTML&CSS into a working WordPress theme (it still takes work; this is not a 1-click converter but still eases the workflow tremendously; you can e.g. assign areas wp-tags like "editable", "login", "blog" etc) get "Pro with WordPress". I have "Pro with WordPress".

With the purchase of any of the two plans, you get 1 year of updates by default.

The big PLUS of this pricing plan: You own the software. It is yours to keep. I can’t stress this enough but since Pinegrow doesn’t rely on Pinegrow infrastructure or an online infrastructure like many other tools. the advantage is that if the company was to shut down one day the software would keep working for you forever.

Only recently, I renewed my owned (one-time) Pinegrow license for another year of updates. My last update had been in 2017 and while it still was working perfectly, I’ve seen some new features in the new versions that I’m really looking forward to such as Stock photo integrations and Bootstrap 4.
I could have just kept using the old version as well, though.

Oh, and one more thing: The "interactions" part you apparently miss out on (notice how it says "Interactions are not included" refers to this new addition to Pinegrow that was added a couple of months ago. This one is not included in the one-time payment plan. Apparently, it can be added as a 50€/year subscription apparently, though.

Annual subscription with interactions

This is the annual subscription which is also ranging from 40€-140€. Although that is, obviously, per year. It includes interactions (see above) by default and here you can also choose between the Regular Pro version and the one with WordPress.

I never used this one but to me, it sounds like if you don't renew the sub you can't use Pinegrow anymore at all (not even the version of the last update you were entitled to).

Verdict on pricing: Since the one-time payment plan and annual subscription is priced the same but the one-time payment allows for continued use only missing out on Interactions, I will choose the one-time payment any day.

My experience using Pinegrow

Remember how in my Mobirise review I mentioned Code Edits are a pita without the paid plugin? I usually create a quick mockup site with Mobirise then open it in Pinegrow and tweak it the way I like ;)I also use Pinegrow to convert WordPress sites to static HTML&CSS (especially one-pagers).

Overall, I don't think I have even grasped all the features Pinegrow has to offer and I'm not that advanced of a coder to make full use of all of its' possibilities but it has been a tremendous help so far and I'll happily continue using it. If I feel like new features that I absolutely want have been added, I'll renew for a year of updates to support the developers and get the features I want.
Last time I renewed for 18€ (since there was a discount going on + I was given a personal discount which kinda stacked with the public one lol).

Conclusion

The learning curve is steep and although I love it I don’t use it frequently enough (mainly because 80% websites I deal with are Wordpress based and I use Divi for that) to consider myself a Pinegrow expert. But when I work with it, I get into it. And every time I do that. I love it. I recommend you check it out, especially if you are an advanced Web Developer/Coder this will be a great tool at your disposal!

This wraps up part III of this 6 part series on Pagebuilders. In the next two parts, we will cover the most popular format: pagebuilders for Wordpress.

Bitaccel new products

Corey from Bitaccel reached out to help get the word out about a new product they are launching and as I am a sucker for a new control panel I said yes.

I should say from the get-go that while the backend infrastructure is likely solid the panel is still a work in progress with a number of issues so do not expect the polish that you might get with other service providers.

The request to take a look was made a week ago and I can see that even in that short time a number of bug fixes have been implemented so they are obviously open to feedback.

As I have not used Bitaccel in the past I don't know much about the service offerings in the past so I am coming to this fresh, the only frustrating thing I found was that I had to literally hunt for the location.

I find the lack of location information a bit strange as that obviously impacts the service viability for people and will be a big influence in the purchase decision, I am sure this will be taken as constructive feedback though.

Checking the IP location, which obviously you can only do after purchase, it seems to be Texas-based.

Sign up

You can sign up here if you want to take a look for yourself: https://www.bitaccel.com/virtual-machines and there is a great simple price calculator:

I would have liked to have seen something a little bit more low end, however, the 2GB Ram plan is the smallest you can buy.

Once you have added some credit you get to the actual panel:

Deploying a virtual machine

I did bring up the strange choice of base operating systems with Corey and he confirmed more will be added, it would be good to see LTS releases of ubuntu at the very least.

Once you have finished with your plan side selection and OS choice the deployment starts, within around 30 seconds the VPS is ready.

The panel itself

The root password is randomly generated and is a 32 character mix of upper and lower case letters and numbers, personally as a host I think this is a good thing as far too many people sign up with 'password1' or 'changeme' without understanding the implications when you are allowed to set your own initial root password.

The options in the panel as of the time of writing are very limited, you have start, stop, reboot and delete however on the website there is some mention of some new features coming in future versions such as Monitoring, API Access, One-Click Cloning, Server Archiving and DNS management.

One very surprising limitation right now though is the lack of ability to reinstall or change OS from the panel, I hope that this is considered a priority update to the panel.

OS Templates

The OS templates are fairly standard/minimal, no horrible surprises like https, bind etc running which is great and sadly all too common.

Use and installed services at initial install (Ubuntu 19)

Backups

There is a backup and restore option built into the panel which is nice to see early on.

It should be noted though that the restores are not currently working, after initial deployment and log in the first thing I did was to take a backup and then when I had finished experimenting here for some screenshots I tried the restore, the VPS never booted back up and could not be booted again.

I have no doubt that it would have been taken care of for me if I opened a support ticket but I did not want to waste anyone's time as I was essentially done at that point.

Final thoughts

When initially signing up I had hoped that this would be a credit-based system built around time however it seems to be per deployment per month, so if you add credit which you need to in order to use the service when you deploy a service it takes a months worth of credit, if you delete the instance early you get nothing back.

The panel itself feels very clean very well integrated and very obvious in terms of ease of use, it is a good UI right now however limited and it will be interesting to see how it progresses.

my personal thoughts are that this should be marked beta and some of the limitations should be made more obvious up-front before taking payment but I also appreciate that creating your pwn panel while running a business is not a simple task and there is bound to be some things happening in the wrong order.

I am looking forward to seeing how it develops and I intend to take another look within 6 months and write an update post.

Guest post by @vyas and @Ympker

Introduction to part II of this series

In this post, we will briefly mention the leading web hosting companies who also have their custom pagebuilders. But the main focus of this post will be on the "Younger Siblings" as we had described in Part I of this series. Specifically, we will talk about Carrd.co, Brizy, and Bookmark pagebuilders. I have used each of these services quite regularly over the years, and am quite confident that you will find them useful.

The Big Boys : Webhosts with Pagebuilders

The Younger Siblings

Younger siblings are companies that cater to a smaller audience, or a niche market. Some of these services include:

-Carrd
-Bookmark
-EpicPixls
-Tilda
-Voog
-Weblium
-Sitepad

Stacksocial has a list of many new and relatively unknown page builders. You may check it out here.

A rough estimate shows that are over 100 different types of pagebuidlers.

We will cover three of these services in detail in the sections below.

Carrd.co

Carrd.co is a page builder, as well as a web hosting platform. It is great for designers. freelancers, and professionals looking to create their portfolio or personal sites. It is a fairly popular service among those who are familiar with the world of pagebuilders. Its servers are in the United States, which has caused a headache or two for me due to low network speeds. More on that later.

I came to know about this service through one of the mailers. Initially, I was rather skeptical but when I looked it up, I was actually impressed and I signed up for it.

Kicking the Tyres

Carrd.co offers a freemium service. You can start with the free model to try this service out. In order to do so, you can choose one of their pre built themes or pre built templates. There are templates for a Landing Page, a signup or a feedback form, a portfolio page or a personal page.

Once the layout is selected, you are taken to a page where you get the basic instructions where you can change the text, the font size etc. You can simply edit the fields and you will be good to go in minutes! Note that the fields are customizable.

Customizing the fields

From "Alex Smith", I change that to my name. Next I changed my image-I put my same image as my avatar on LES. You can change the font size and also change the pattern by adding a drag and drop shadow.

You can preview the draft site in desktop mode and mobile more. Once you are ready to publish, you only have to enter your contact details.

Click to see the test site

Information on the tiers, features, for the pricing plans, is available here: https://carrd.co/pro

Carrd.co is under active development- most recently it was updated about three weeks ago the time of posting this message. AJ, the founder and creator of Carrd.co, is the person behind html5up.

Give carrd.co a try, you will be pleasantly surprised!

Tip: If you are considering a paid plan, lookout for the deals around Black Friday. You get a 50% discount on the pro plan which typically cost, 20, US dollars, will end up costing you less than 10. For that amount, you can get 10 one-page websites.

####What is this service best for
1. Carrd is great for making a portfolio page, a landing page, and you can also have your resume up there. Or you can just create quick one-page site for your friends, your family, your girlfriend, boyfriend, as the case may be.
2. You can clone a site, that it, create a staging site and a production site if you wish. that gives an advantage of creating multiple options inc are you want to seek approval from the client or the person(s) you are creating the site for.

Quirks and limitations

I have two problems with this service:
1. In India, I get low speeds. This makes the creation and loading of the site very slow. I had reached out to AJ back in December 2018, and he had suggested that I use Cloudflare or any other CDN. I did try that, but to no avail. In Europe and North America, speeds might be better.
2. Sometimes, the sites go into something called as 'initialising' mode. This happens probably for 5 minutes every month. For that period, the sites are inaccessible. Recently, I received a mailer from AJ that required me to change the servers for my sites. Maybe with the new server(s) this problem will go away.
3. You can export the site in the higher price tiers only (Pro Plus and Pro Max)

Summing it all up

I am a very happy user of carrd.co, and would recommend it if you are looking for a no-frills site that is quick to set up.
In spite of the minor quirks, I give it a thumbs up.

Carrd.co also has good documentation, I am adding the link to their support page for reference.

Bookmark.com

Introduction

Let us take a look at bookmark.com. I learnt about this page builder + web host through a Facebook group. The specifications they offered did not impress me much initially. But upon closer look, there was one feature about bookmark made me sign up: the AI-backed website builder (AIDA).

Signing up and pricing plans

Bookmark also follows the freemium model. Like other services, in order to use a custom domain, one has to sign up for the paid plans, which start at 12 US dollars a month on an annual subscription. This tier puts you in the 'unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage' category. Like many members of LES, I am also sceptical about anything 'unlimited'. Inspire of my reservations, I had purchased the 2 website plan. It made the pricing attractive.

Creating a website

Initially, I found AIDA to be gimmicky! But creating a website is fast and super easy with AIDA. In the included video, you can see how I have created a sample website in a very short time.

Customizing the fields

Once the website is created, you can change the fields to your liking: fonts, colours, images and more. This can be done manually or using AIDA, again. It is difficult to change the type of website- for example, from a blog to a photo gallery. Also, the layout cannot be changed easily once it has been chosen. You might be better off re-creating the website. You can save as many sites as you like, until you publish them. The upper limit to the number of published sites is the number of sites included in your plan.


Images and videos

Bookmark offers integration with stock image websites, and you can replace the images that come with the stock website. You can also upload your own images, or save them from google drive onto your bookmark.com folder. The site claims there is no upper limit on the number of images or their size. I have not stress-tested the system, so I cannot comment on the actual limits if any.

e-Learning Courses

Bookmark.com offers some e-learning courses as a part of their paid packages, or you can subscribe to them independently.

Concluding remarks

Bookmark is largely catered towards web designers and agencies who want to use the white label service for their clients. But the ease of creating a website using AIDA may make it an attractive option for the non-technically-inclined user. Pricing wise, it becomes quite expensive for the causal user beyond the $12 a month plan.

Brizy

Brizy is an interesting beast, I mean it in a good way. This service can be called a hybrid. It is a pagebuidler and a web host. In that sense, it falls under the "younger siblings" category. They also offer cloud hosting, which uses their custom page builder.

a. You can download the .zip file that has the readymade site, simply upload it on your server, unpack it, and you are good to go. This is a great option if you are not planning to update the site regularly. That is, you are looking to create a static site. This is the "Export HTML" option.
b. The other option is to use your website as a 'front' face, but the page creation, image hosting, etc. happens from brizy. You can update the pages or the data on the webpages, and the content will be synced dynamically with your website. This is the "Server Sync" Option.

The other two options- allow you to host on brizy using your own custom domain, or use a subdomain with a "subdomain.brizy.io" extension. This option is the default for the free tier. Brizy also offers a WordPress plugin, which we might cover in a subsequent part of this series.

The real interesting option is the way in which you can host a website on your own server.

You can read the page Publishing options for Brizy
for more details.

Pricing plans

Brizy has three pricing tiers: Free account, Pro Personal Plan, and Pro Studio Plan. The pricing is at the mid-segment : US $ 49 / year for Personal Pro and $ 99 for Pro Studio.
Here is the interesting part: under the free account, you can link 1 custom domain or subdomain. That is, you get one website hosted for free.

Similarly, under the Pro Personal Plan, you can link up to 3 custom domains or subdomains. In the Pro Studio plan, there is no upper limit. You can visit the pricing page on their website for details.

Brizy currently has a 'lifetime' deal running, something you can notice in bold at the top of their website.

SSL

Both Custom Domain and Brizy Subdomain publishing options come with free SSL included. According to their website, SSL "Takes up to 24 hours to be installed." In my experience, it DOES take 24 hours for the ssl to be set up.

CDN

Brizy has a list of POPs on their website, which they use for free and paid tiers. Particularly under the paid plan, the CDN locations in Asia Pacific region is quite extensive. This makes it an attractive proposition.

Hosting is on amazon EC2, image processing by Fastly, and their CDN provider may be a name familiar to most readers in the ES community: BunnyCDN.

Overall, they seem to have chosen some good Infrastructure providers, which means that eh performance is expected to be above par. One concern I have about such services is the price they have to pay to the providers. Amazon' s AWS in particular can get expensive. This aspect is best-illustrated in the below video.

Video: AWS fees can quickly turn expensive!

Further reading:
1. Basic and Global CDN for Brizy

2. Specifications for cloud hosting

Brizy Cloud

I really like this option. For this review, I have included a video made from screen captures. I created a test site on Brizy cloud, and hosted it on the shared hosting site. I thought this was a good way to put to use the Black Friday offer from 2019 by Gullo's Hosting.

Watch the video

https://gaathastory.hippovideo.io/video/play/idjtxkG6bFT3nJxJKbfNUcFlmwywclicW25lWKIwLk0

Summing it all up

I really like Brizy and the simplicity and options it offers. In particular, you can create a rather complex page (or series of pages) and publish them in a variety of ways. This product is under active development. On the flip side, there are bugs, and the Wordpress plugin had a security incident a couple of months ago.Brizy is worth a try- heck, they offer free of 1 website.

Conclusion: Part II

This wraps up part II of this 6 part series. Hope you found the site builder options discussed in this post useful. The list I have posted at the beginning of this article is by no means exhaustive. But I thought the best way to create value for the readers was by writing about services that I have used first hand. With that logic, I should have even covered Sitepad, but that is a post for another day. Hope you find the mini-reviews useful. As always, looking forward to your comments, feedback and recommendations if any.

You should also have unlimited edit rights in this section.

You can start to transfer/create your posts here and they will essentially look the same in grav as they do here, actually they look a bit better the code and quote tags etc actually look better in grav.

Part I: Introduction

The title, in case you were wondering, is a play on words on a movie by Woody Allen. And as the title suggests, this post is an introduction to the world of Pagebuilders. It is also the first of a multi-part series on pagebuilders that I have written in collaboration with @Ympker. The idea behind this initiative is to pool our experiences together and create a reference of sorts for the LowEndSpirit community. Lets' call this an original content for LES.
Image: Pixabay

Some of the posts in this series will focus on one or more available tools for a given category of pagebuilders. Others would be more generic in nature, and provide an overview of a particular tool or category. Without further delay, lets' dive into the topic right away.

So you are interested in knowing more about Pagebuilders, Eh?

If you look up discussions on sites like Quora, you would be inclined to believe that page builders exist for one type of Content Management System: Wordpress. This perception might be mostly true. Indeed, the majority of page builders exist for this most commonly used content management platform. But if we look at the Universe of web hosting, or its subset, Content Management Systems, you will realize that page builders cover a much wider territory.

What is a Pagebuilder Anyway?

In a nutshell, a page builder is a visual tool, which will help in creating web pages. The most common names that come to mind are:

• Site builders offered by Squarespace or Wix
  or

• add-ons or plugins for WordPress, such as elementor, Divi and Brizy.

But the story does not end there. Over the years, I have even used some pagebuilders, without realizing what I was using. Here's an example:

Remember this Logo?

Hint

Image: Pinterest

or

Another Hint

Image: Betaarchive

if you are not prone to getting too nostalgic, Wikipedia has a great list of HTML editors that I believe were the pre-cursors to today's website creation tools. You may be familiar with some of them: Bluefish, Google Web Designer, Dreamweaver, and Seamonkey.

Okay, but...who uses Pagebuilders Anyway?

This category of web design tools caters to two sets of audience. One category is people who are not comfortable with or familiar with coding. Particularly with the rise in the no-code movement, the usage of such drag and drop tools has gained popularity.

The second is website designers and digital agencies, who would rather focus on customizing the websites for speed, security, efficiency, and so on. For them, the ability to utilize existing tools helps them utilize their time more efficiently, which ultimately has a bearing on the cost.

What are the advantages and limitations of Pagebuilders?

Advantages

One of the biggest advantages of using pagebuilders is they speed up the creation of pages. Flexibility, responsive. Many pagebuilders come with inbuilt image search, codes for embed players, etc. This really adds to their appeal. In addition, there are features for greater user engagement, such as surveys, forms, etc.

Disadvantages or Limitations

Now we move to the disadvantages. First of all, you're relying on third-party systems, many of which involve creating an account and entering payment information. For poorly designed or maintained systems, this could lead to security issues. Next, depending on the pricing plan, the scope of customization may be limited. A lot of providers offer free subscription plans, but they come with many limitations.

The level of control a user may have on the layout, features, etc. may be limited. In addition, many of these applications use closed source or proprietary software. This makes the user dependent on the provider for updates, security patches, and so on. Which is exactly the game some providers play.

As you will read in some of our subsequent posts, many of the Freemium models offer paid annual subscriptions. In other words, if you end the subscription, you are no longer able to use the service. Worse, you might be stuck with an older, unpatched version of the software.

Are All Pagebuilders Created Equal?

The short answer is no.

Image: A VYas

For the sake of simplicity, I would like to classify pagebuilders into six categories:

1.The Big Boys
These services are commercially available to a very wide group of audience, and have a large user base. These large web hosts offer web hosting and have custom web builders. Examples include Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Jimdo.

2. The Rising Stars
These cater to a smaller audience base. Examples of such service providers include (Carrd.co, Tilda.cc, Bookmark, Epicpixls, Voog).

3. Page builders offered by hosting companies such as GoDaddy, Namechaep, Dynadot, etc. are also included in this list. The pagebuilder offered by Softaculous (Sitepad) also features in this list. Installtron or Cloudron might also offer similar applications.

4.Desktop apps such as Mobirise, 8b.

5.Pagebuilders for Wordpress
As mentioned in the first half of this post, there are numerous options for pagebuilders for Wordpress . Examples include Elementor, Divi, Brizy. We will cover some of these in detail in a subsequent post.

6.Landing page creators
This is the broadest category in our list, and can include mailing list; video hosting; and CRM services. Some of the examples in this list include Mailchimp, Hippovideo, Hubspot, and builder.io.

Bookmark.com

Intrigued (or confused) enough?

Don't worry, we will cover the above categories in sufficient detail in the following posts. We hope this will help you clear the air on the topic of pagebuilders.

How This Series is Structured

Most blogs, tutorials, and review sites cover the "Big Boys" in sufficient depth, therefore we will not talk about them in this series. We will also not cover the pagebuilders offered by hosting companies for similar reasons. We may, however, include a short review of Softaculous in the last part of this series.

The subsequent posts will be as follows:

Part II : Pagebuilders: The Rising Stars

Part III : Pagebuilders: Desktop App

Part IV: Pagebuilders for WordPress - Part I

Part V: Pagebuilders for WordPress- part II

Part VI: Landing Page Creators (This will also be the concluding part of this series)

Note from @ympker about this project

So, the other day @vyas asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a joint-post about various Page Builders with him. Given that I have used a bunch of different page builders already, I thought this might be a nice little addition to our forum.

I will give you guys a short summary of my experience with:

-Divi (ElegantThemes; WordPress),

-Mobirise (HTML&CSS + Bootstrap Pagebuilder),

-Architect (HTML&CSS Pagebuilder) and

-Pinegrow (HTML&CSS + Bootstrap, Foundation and WordPress Theme Maker Addon).

All of these are great Pagebuilders and I appreciate them for what they are. Like with many things in life, I wouldn't call any of them perfect. I'm still waiting for the Ultimate Pagebuilder that unites all of my favourite features of these in one Pagebuilder but I guess that's not gonna happen. Anyway, I will try to give you an insight on what you can expect from each of the Pagebuilders I mentioned and perhaps get a better idea of which Pagebuilder might be suitable for your project.

Screenshot of Brizy Pagebuilder by A Vyas

This is the first in a series of posts in the "Easy Mode" series

I thought I would write this up as a super easy basic guide to an almost no-effort method of migrating a KVM VPS from one host to another without having to worry about any minor changes in software stacks that could cause your backup and restore to fail or not restore as expected.

As a host one of the unfortunate realities is that sometimes it is just necessary to have migrations either due to end of life of an OS major version or impending hardware failure etc and on the rare occasion you need people to migrate their own server, this usually results in a 10% panic rate and a desperate cry for help.

With all that in mind I thought I would illustrate possibly one of the most simple server migration methods possible, I have done this based on KVM to KVM as that is likely to be the most common method however this method should also work for Xen HVM to Xen HVM or KVM to Xen HVM or Xen HVM to KVM and finally VMware to VMware should also work fine.

I can't cover the huge amount of different control panels and access methods out there but all that I have used either have access to an ISO mount or a rescue mode so it should be easy for you to use this guide as long as your host's control panel provides at least an ISO mount option or a rescue mode.

In this example, I have used a KVM VPS on a host that uses SolusVM and migrated it to a host that uses Virtualizor.

Requirements and additional info before we get started.

• The destination VPS should have the same size hard disk (bigger is fine).
• This will only go as fast as the link between the 2 locations, latency is a huge factor, moving a 50GB Disk image from India to New York is no fun.
• Some attention to detail is required, it is possible to lose your data if you mess up the commands.
• If the destination control panel does not provide a 'reconfigure networking' button or a serial console/VNC option you can use to reconfigure networking yourself you may want to consider configuring but not activating the network settings for the destination VPS on the source prior to shutdown, SolusVM, however, will do this for you and in some cases depending on the Hosts configuration options in Virtualizor it will also.
• Source VPS, in this case, was at Inception Hosting - London, the destination VPS was with Nexus Bytes - New York

First of all, I created a quick KVM VPS as the source on the SolusVM based host, installed apache2 and slightly modified the test page which you can see loading on the source IP:

Then I shut down the Source VPS and put both the source and destination VPS into rescue mode.

For SolusVM (Source):

For Virtualizor (Destination):

note: I noticed virtualizer has a tendency to just lock out all options even those for coming out of rescue mode when you do this which is resolved by simply refreshing the page, don't worry it does not resubmit the action

Now you should have both the source and destination in rescue mode and you should be able to login to both over ssh:

SolusVM VPS (Source)

Virtualizor VPS (Destination)

Next, you need to examine your disks to make sure you get the right one, the rescue modes will create a ramdisk so what was vda or sda on your VPS when it was running may not be now, this is the part you need to be sure you get correct, I have shown a side by side below using fdisk -l to check which disk I want to migrate to which disk on the other end.

From the image above we can see that the 5GiB disk is the one I want /dev/vda because I know my source disk is 5GiB and on the destination side I can see that it is actually /dev/vdb I want to copy the disk to, the 10 GiB disk. It is very important that you check this before going any further as it could well be different.

Because we now know I want to copy vda on the source to vdb on the destination we can structure the command to do this.

dd if=/dev/vda bs=32M status=progress | ssh root@45.61.123.123 "dd of=/dev/vdb"

let us break this down so it is better understood as there is nothing worse than knowing which buttons to press to achieve a goal but having no idea why they wor or what they actually do:

• dd - Short for "data duplicator" a common commend used for copying or duplicating data.
• if=/dev/vda - The input or what we are reading, in this case, the entire virtual hard disk image
• bs=32M - BYTES, the number of BYTES to read per block when copying, you can set this yourself, I have found 32M is a good average.
• status=progress - This shows the progress of the copy, it has a very small overhead but without it you get nothing in terms of a progress indicator
• | - The pipe, in very simple terms, lets you pass the result of one command or set of commands to the next
• ssh root@45.61.123.123 - Because this is after the pipe | it takes what was done before and sends it over an ssh session as root to the destination IP 45.61.123.123 (fake)
• "dd of=/dev/vdb" - Finally the instruction on what to do at the other side which is to use dd "data duplicator" to write the blocks it is receiving over ssh to /dev/vdb

Once that command is issued you will see something like this:

And when it completes you will see:

As we can see that took 634 seconds or a little over 10 minutes to complete and now the disk image on the destination should be identical to the source.

The next step is to cancel rescue mode on the destination via the control panel and then boot the destination VPS, going to the new IP address once it is finished booting shows that it was a success as the same page loads on the new IP:

If your destination VPS has a bigger disk size than the source you will not instantly gain the extra space by following the above process, you will need to either expand your partitions or extend your logical volume if using LVM, that however is beyond the scope of this particular tutorial but if you are also looking for easy mode for that then just boot the VPS with a GParted ISO or a rescue cd that contains GParted which will give you a simple UI to expand your partitions or look up vgextend and lvextend if using LVM.

If having read this you discover that your host does not have a built-in rescue mode then I would suggest requesting they supply a SystemRescueCd ISO (Also contains GParted) https://www.system-rescue-cd.org/ so you can mount it and boot into rescue mode.

Currently there are a couple of guest writers developing some great content for LES. This article popped up out of nowhere today.

Full credit for this article goes to @vyas I appreciate your effort and I am sure it is very much appreciated by the whole community here.

Free Shared Web Hosting: Offers Galore

Over the past couple of months, providers on LES have generously offered free shared hosting plans for the LES community. The goal or objective behind is simple: they want to give back to the community and help those who can benefit from these offers.

In the below section I have compiled the list of offers by Four providers who have posted such offers since March 2020. Relevant details such as location, bandwidth, number of websites, disk space, are also included. This information is already available in the forums. However, wouldn't it be cool if it was available in a single page? I wanted to keep it simple, and while a more comprehensive tabulation like the one mentioned in this post might make sense for some, I opted for brevity and simplicity. With this thought, let us dive into these offers.

Presenting the offers Together

Notes:
1. DA stands for Direct Admin control panel

2. Free shared hosting plans by Hostingcubes are available for a period of one year at 7 different locations. Visit the offer page by @Lee - for further details

3. Requirements for Free Shared Hosting by Khan Web:
   "All you would need to do is join Discord Channel & send a PM to user @AK_KWH, mentioning your discord username"

The Obvious and Not-So-Obvious

There are several reasons to question the rationale behind such offers. For example, why would anybody offer a service for free? Then there is the suspicion that the providers might use the sign-ups as an opportunity to up-sell services.
That may be true in some cases, but more than one provider in the above list has mentioned that these offers rarely result in paying customers. In the words of @seriesn from Nexusbytes,

"Usually if you are not paying for your project, you don't take it seriously logic applies here..... I guess it also depends because a lot of these use cases are for personal projects that never take off, or people just abandon them." - @seriesn

Risk of abuse by Users

The intention of this post is not to delve upon the pro's and cons of free shared web hosting. But I thought of mentioning that the providers can often face abuses from users and those looking to exploit the gratis service.
This discussion from the forums, based on experiences of Lee with Hostingcubes, offers an interesting perspective.

Free service during beta testing

Some providers can offer free accounts for a limited period when they are launching new products or services. A recent example is Hello Internet @hello, who offered free CPanel hosting in Germany. In exchange, they sought feedback, testing from the users. A provider may choose to continue offering the 'free' service to the beta testers beyond the testing period.

Summing it all up

The act of offering a service for free does not limit itself to shared hosting on this forum. Some users have posted their offers for a 'free' use of VPS. But I thought of limiting this post to shared web hosting offers. One reason was focus. The other reason is more personal: I have benefited over the past years from free web hosting services. This prompted me to compile the offers and write this post that would provide a handy resource the LES community.

The details in the table are compiled from the offer posts. In some cases, I have used the details by checking with the providers, or from my own account. In case of any updates, errors, or additions, do leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Links to free shared web hosting offers by providers:

I have included them in the table above but for ready reference, here they are, in no particular order:
1. Tetahost https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/1047
2. Nexusbytes: https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/850/free-shared-hosting-servedez
3. Khan Web Hosting: https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/772/free-directadmin-nvme-shared-hosting
4. Hostingcubes: https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/636/lab-rats-required-to-test-new-free-hosting-service/p1

Nahian from NexusBytes sent in something a little bit different which I know is the sort of thing a lot of people love, I resource pool of sorts as the plans are stackable or deployable in different locations.

A bit about Nexus Bytes LLC from them:

Nexus Bytes LLC was founded by a couple of IT professionals over a coffee meetings and lots of subsequent WhatsApp discussions on how to make web hosting and server management great again (MWHASMGA). After days of intense discussions, the Nexus Bytes mission was born.

· Guided by our mission, Nexus Bytes strives to provide web hosting and VPS services that are affordable and sustainable, while at the same time providing rock-solid stable servers with customer service that treats you as a family member and not another number who needs to be dealt with. All our customer service officers abide by our service creed: "If it isn’t unreasonable, illegal or technically unfeasible, we will strive to meet your expectation."

· Here at Nexus Bytes, we do things differently. You are not just a customer or another line in our CRM database. You are part of the Nexus Bytes family and we only want the best for our family. We are not going to sell our family members what we won’t buy for ourselves. That’s the Nexus Bytes difference.

· We are not here to sell you services, we are here to earn your business

The Offer

Buy 3 – Get 1 Free!

Premium VPS - plans VPG-1G and above are eligible.

Plans can be stacked in 1 location/distributed between all 4!, plans are scaleable, not transferable or switchable after.

Premium VPS Plan: https://nexusbytes.com/kvm-vps-hosting.html

Important: When ordering please enter the following in the order notes:

4forWhole = Combine all 4 into 1 location or KeepMeLone = Each VPS will be created at their own selected location.

So for example if you buy 3 of the following plans which are $4 each, $12 total /month you will get 4 of them, you can pick which locations you want them in or you can combine all 4 into 1 large plan in a single location, this works out at $3 per 1GB Ram after your free bonus VPS, IP's, however, do not stack, it is restricted to 1 IP per VPS when stacking.

Example plan:

VPS-1G

• RAM: 1 GB
• Storage: 15 GB (20 GB With Annual Payment)
• Bandwidth: 1000 GB (@1Gbit)
• CPU Core: 1 @3.5+ GHz (Fair Share)
• IPv4: 1
• IPv6: 1x /64 (Not Available In Germany)
• Free Blesta Billing Software
• NAT Backup VPS.

Bonus

For the next 7 days from today if you decide to only buy 2 VPS1G or above plans and enter "Double the trouble" in the order notes Nexus Bytes will throw in Free DirectAdmin licenses for both servers, this offer is without limits, the example given by Nexus Bytes to make this clear was:

For example, one can order 2x1G in LA, 2X1G in Utah, 2X1G in NY, 2X1G in Miami and 2x1G In Germany and get 1 DA license for each of these locations
As usual, our family perks are still valid (CWP Pro license, blesta, free backup space etc)

There are 5 locations to pick from:

• East Coast (NYC)
• East Coast (Miami)
• West Coast (LA)
• West Coast (Utah)
• Europe (Germany)

Payment Options:

• Debit/Credit Card
• Paypal
• Ali Pay
• WeChat Pay
• OXXO Mexico
• Boleto Brazil
• WebMoney
• India NetBanking
• Paytm
• Bitcoin / BitcoinCash / LiteCoin / Ethereum

I personally bought one of the 0.5G plans (not included in this offer) around a week ago in New York to grab some screenshots etc for the Runcloud and grav screenshots in the Nuts and bolts post made a few days ago and it is a snappy little beast, no real content on it but you can check the load times of the bare-bones site here: https://nexusbytes.lowendspirit.com/

Little bit more info on Nexus Bytes:

Website address: https://nexusbytes.com
Company Registration: Connecticut:1216352
Terms: https://nexusbytes.com/knowledgebase/2/Policies

Other service offered

• vDedicated: https://nexusbytes.com/virtual-dedicated-server.html
• Reseller Pool : https://nexusbytes.com/reseller-pool.html

If you have been on a hosting related forum you will no doubt be aware of the nexus bytes Thursday posts posted by Nahian also known as @seriesn on the forums.

Before launching this site I made a request to providers on the forum to provide some offers, it was fairly short notice, I did not expect much but enough came in to create a backlog, I want to be able to react fairly quickly to requests as they are coming in fast now so I have decided to do a compilation post to clear out the backlog before the offers get too old and any new ones can be fresh, that said I do not plan to bombard the site with offers, general offers can always be posted or found on the forum: https://talk.lowendspirit.com/categories/offers or the exclusive offers: https://talk.lowendspirit.com/categories/les-exclusive-offers

I will really only be posting offers here that are a bit different to those found on the forums, I am always on the lookout for something a bit different, a great discount, a tiny server, a unique selling point or add-on, a service that you don't see often, a free trial, etc, the general common location offers will be considered but I do not want real-time or near term replication with offers that are already out there on this or other forums as that seems to just be posting for posting's sake.

That said if you have something you want to hare generally it does not have to be an offer, a company introduction, a service introduction, a new location, a new website, feel free to reach out (contact link on the right) I will be happy to post an article.

If you sent me an offer and it is not here it is because I am either keeping it for an individual post next week or it did not qualify.

A little bit of extra info about each host above:

Hotline Servers

• Company Name: Hotlineservers LLC
• Billing portal link: https://www.hotlineservers.com
• Looking Glass: lg,hotlineservers.com
• Rep: @hotlineservers
• Registered as a host on https://talk.lowendspirit.com in May 2020

Clouvider

• Company Name: Clouvider Limited
• Billing portal link: https://console.clouvider.co.uk/
• Looking Glass: http://lg.clouvider.net/
• Rep: @Clouvider
• Registered as a host on https://talk.lowendspirit.com in November 2019

Hostworld

• Company Name: Hostworld Limited
• Billing portal link: https://portal.hostworld.uk/
• Looking Glass: http://lg.hostworld.uk/
• Rep: @hostworld
• Registered as a host on https://talk.lowendspirit.com in April 2020

Khan Webhost

• Company Name: KhanWebHost PVT LTD
• Billing portal link: https://khanwebhost.com/clientarea.php
• Looking Glass: Contact for test IP/file
• Rep: @AK_KWH
• Registered as a host on https://talk.lowendspirit.com in December 2019

Hello Internet

• Company Name: Hello Internet Limited
• Billing portal link: https://hello-internet.co.uk/clientarea.php
• Looking Glass: Contact for test IP.
• Rep: @hello
• Registered as a host on https://talk.lowendspirit.com in March 2020

srvr.ovh

• Company Name: Tom Miller - Sole Trader
• Billing portal link: https://srvr.ovh/
• Looking Glass: Contact for test IP.
• Rep: @Not_Oles
• Registered as a host on https://talk.lowendspirit.com in April 2020

Geeksolutions

• Company Name: Sole proprietorship in Ontario Canada
• Billing portal link: https://billing.geeksolutions.ca
• Looking Glass: N/A
• Rep: @wdmg
• Registered as a host on https://talk.lowendspirit.com in March 2020

tetahost

• Company Name: Tetahost SRL
• Billing portal link: https://client.tetahost.com/
• Looking Glass: Contact for test IP.
• Rep: @tetehost
• Registered as a host on https://talk.lowendspirit.com in May 2020

I thought it might be good to let people know what it is that runs this place both server specs-wise and the platform(s).

Note: There are a few affiliate links in here for Runcloud, you don't have to use them but obviously it helps out if you do. direct link: https://runcloud.io

The quick and very simple overview is that it runs on an Inception Hosting SSD KVM VPS with 2GB Ram, 2 cores (burst) within Clouvider DC, running Runcloud with vanilla for the forum and Grav for the blog.

Server

• SSD based KVM VPS.
• 2 GB Ram
• 20 GB Disk
• UK/London (Clouvider DC - Telehouse Two North)

$ lscpu
Architecture:        x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):      32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:          Little Endian
CPU(s):              2
On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1
Thread(s) per core:  1
Core(s) per socket:  1
Socket(s):           2
NUMA node(s):        1
Vendor ID:           GenuineIntel
CPU family:          6
Model:               94
Model name:          Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 v5 @ 3.60GHz
Stepping:            3
CPU MHz:             3600.008
BogoMIPS:            7200.01
Hypervisor vendor:   KVM
Virtualization type: full
L1d cache:           32K
L1i cache:           32K
L2 cache:            4096K
L3 cache:            16384K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):   0,1
Flags:               fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon rep_good nopl xtopology cpuid tsc_known_freq pni pclmulqdq ssse3 fma cx16 pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand hypervisor lahf_lm abm 3dnowprefetch invpcid_single pti ssbd ibrs ibpb stibp fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 hle avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid rtm mpx rdseed adx smap clflushopt xsaveopt xsavec xgetbv1 arat md_clear

$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           1992         532         826          90         634        1215
Swap:           255         127         128

Now I know 2GB Ram is not exactly lowEnd, although recent discussions did suggest that it is the plan of choice for many, on the other hand, it is not exactly a cluster of dedicated servers either, initially the forum alone was running on a 512mb ram VPS with 5GB Disk, during standard operation this was fine however during the backup cycles and busy period there were some noticeable slowdowns, knowing the future plans to also host the main LES site (this one) on the same server as well as some future plans I decided to upgrade the server to cover current and future needs, the plan base rate should I be charging myself would be €5 per month and 50% off sales are not unheard of so certainly a low-end price tag.

Runcloud

I went with Runcloud because I had heard good things about it and really I just wanted to get on with doing instead of messing around getting everything just right, while vanilla is fairly straight forward to set up and install the documentation does not really reflect reality and I assume that is in part because they want you to use their paid version, using Runcloud allowed me to get a good config/base setup within 3 minutes, it has a really good intuitive dash and adding a server is super simple.

Once you sign up at Runcloud you need to add a server, unless the host is specifically mentioned just pick other, in my experience any KVM based server works, I have not tried OpenVZ 7 yet but I am not aware of anything specifically that would prevent it from working.

Once you add a server you have the option of simply providing the IP and root account password or generating a self-install script, the latter is the option I took, you can then actually see the install completion percentage on the Runcloud dashboard as it progresses.

I have on a few occasions noticed on faster servers it gets stuck at 98% and it is due to waiting for redis to start because best guess a service action happens to quick so it is not in an expected state, if you get this simply running: systemctl restart redis-server and it should spring back to life and complete seconds later.

Then you just need to add a web application:

Unless you actually want Wordpress, select 'Custom Web Application' you will then be given all the general configurable options, the defaults in most cases are going to be fine, you can change and tweak them later, a screenshot of that for illustrative purposes:

Once you have created the Web Application stack you can then create databases as required on the left, that part is ridiculously simple so I will save you the enter username/password here screenshots, then you are ready to go, Runcloud does not have an automated installer for vanilla so that was a manual install, the included vanilla .htaccess was not quite perfect so required some tweaks but nothing major.

If you want to install something else then you can refer to the script instructions or you can choose one of the ready to roll Runcloud scripts, first select your newly created web application then click on the Script Installer:

For this site I added another web application and manually deployed Grav rather than use the script installer because it is so simple and I wanted a specific version, Runcloud has a TON of great features from automatic ssl deployment, hourly backups, snapshots, 1 click restores, Git integration, file management, cron management, Services management and app portability, you can use it to push your entire site to another server in minutes.

If you are like me and you just want to get on with the end product instead of spending a week preparing the groundwork but still want a solid base to work from then Runcloud really is a great option.

Some of the dashboard shots for those that like them:

It is worth mentioning that up to a few days ago I was using the basic version of Runcloud, I recently switched to pro because I wanted the multi-server features for a staging environment for another little project, it also allowed me to do a few things again so I could grab some clean screenshots for this post, I did, however, start LES (the forum) on the free version of Runcloud.

Grav

Grav http://getgrav.org runs this site, what I have started referring to as LESB the lowendspirit blog as people are generally referring to the forum now as just LES, I wanted to use Grav because it is super lightweight, I have always found myself deploying WordPress and then regretting it when things grow later down the line and you need plugin after plugin after plugin to achieve what should be a fairly simple goal, some people love WordPress, I don't hate it, I just wanted something much lighter weight.

A better description from Wikipedia:

Grav is a free software, self-hosted content management system (CMS) written in the PHP programming language and based on the Symfony web application framework. It uses a flat-file database for both backend and frontend.

Grav is designed to have a shallow learning curve, and to be easy to set up. The focus of Grav is speed and simplicity, rather than an abundance of built-in features that come at the expense of complexity.

The name Grav is just a shortened version of the word "gravity."

Grav is the most starred PHP CMS on GitHub, with over 11,000 stars

Grav does not use MySQL or similar, it is probably the better free CMS without a full-blown database, it took me under 24 hours to get comfortable with although I have to admit I decided I it was not the right option to achieve my goals halfway through and deleted it and then later decided to give it another chance, it is a shallow learning curve it is just different enough to give you a headache initially if like me you have little patience for developers not having a crystal ball and interpreting your every need before you have them

Because of the way it has been designed it is ridiculously fast, required almost zero resources to run and the caching is super simple to handle.

Despite its lightweight design, Grav has a huge amount of tweakable option and more advanced options like proxy/reverse proxy, HTTP header control and hundreds more build directly into the UI.

One of the big things I like about Grav is that it uses markdown, one of the elements of Wordpress I never liked was the formatting could get messy, what you see in the post creation page often has no resemblance to how it looks when published, I know plugins exist to make that better than the default but plugin, plugin, plugin, with Grav however that is not an issue.

If you want to go very very lightweight you can simply do away with the admin part of Grav and just directly edit and create the pages in a super simple structure using markdown files.

Example:

# ls usr/pages/
01.home  about-contact  root.md

# ls 01.home/
01.hello-world  blog_list.md  extravm-30-off-recurring-sydney-australia-kvm  the-nuts-and-bolts

$ ls 01.home/01.hello-world/
blog_item.md  helloworld.png

If you don't use the Grav installer on Runcloud, and are testing it on one of your other servers, getting started really is as simple as grabbing the zip and unzipping it in your webroot or where ever you want to run it from then creating your admin user.

Some screenshots the 90 seconds of effort including screenshots Grav site I set up on a little 512mb nexusbytes KVM VPS:

Pick your theme, all integrated into the dash:

Add your plugins as required, although what it comes with is enough for most cases:

Then you can start adding pages, I just put a super simple theme on it but some of them are really nice:

With the base theme it looks more like this:

You can see it live at https://nexusbytes.lowendspirit.com although that link will not work for very long (sorry people of the future)

Depending on your server setup and permissions and security hardening you may not be able to install the plugins or themes directly from the web UI as I found as it requires (exec) which makes me a little bit nervous so I killed that off, the plugins are super simple to install through the command line though and every plugin or theme on the https://getgrav.org website (there are a lot) can be installed with gpm (Grav package manager) from the installation root of your Grav site much like a package distro manager you simple run:

bin/gpm install packagename

Example:

That is the overview of the nuts and bolts of this place and the forum, I do plan on doing a more in-depth look at Grav in the future if there is any interest as I think it would be a great platform for the super tiny servers out there, some 64mb VPS plans do exist and it would be very interesting to see what people could produce with Grav

I am not the worlds best writer I am sure there is room for improvement which will come in time.

Thanks for reading, happy to answer any questions.

Ant.

I reached out to a few providers to get things started here and got a barrage of offers thrown my way which I really appreciate however someone had to be first and this to me seemed to be the most on-point, on-brand offer of them all.

Mike from ExtraVM is offering: 30% off recurring for any Sydney, Australia KVM VPS Located with OVH Sydney.

Coupon Code: SYDNEYLES

While the products this coupon code covers go all the way up to 10GB Ram the most intriguing for me at least was the 512MB plan:

• 512MB DDR4 ECC RAM
• 1 CPU Core
• 7GB SSD Space
• 200GB Bandwidth @ 200Mbps
• 1 IPv4, 1 IPv6
• Complete DDoS Protection
• IP & Firewall Management

$3.50 USD monthly, with this coupon that drops down to just $2.45 USD monthly with even bigger discounts for yearly purchases, for Australia this is an absolute bargain.

Direct product group link: https://extravm.com/billing/cart.php?gid=34
ExtraVM website: https://extravm.com
Payment methods: PayPal, Crypto via BitPay. Stripe, Amazon Pay, Paymentwall.

Mike has been running ExtraVM since 2014 with what seems to be essentially a flawless record so I have no hesitation in giving this my personal recommendation.

This offer expires on the 30th June 2020

From the ExtraVM website

ExtraVM was started in 2014 based out of Texas to provide a reliable, secure, and affordable hosting service with DDoS protection and modern hardware that provides better performance than others. We make our services available to nearly anyone in the world by offering payment options for many countries that have limited access to services. We use only datacenters and network providers who have been proven to be reliable and provide good connectivity and speeds.

Link to terms: https://extravm.com/tos.php

Points of note in the terms

• No Tor Exit nodes
• No crypto mining software
• No public or paid VPN services to be hosted, I assume that extends to proxy services.
• No reselling of services without prior permission.

Welcome to lowEndSpirit.com, a place to discuss running very low end (and these days not so low end) virtual private server, I will be listing VPS plans i have found on the web that cost less than USD$7 per month (and occasionally above that figure) and how to run various services on them.

For those that are new to the whole Low End scene the above paragraph is actually a tribute to LowEndBox as it was back when it launched in 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080424094819/http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/hello-world/ This was the origin of the whole $7 VPS idea and more to the point the idea of being able to do more with less.

Obviously things have evolved since then however many people still have the spirit of the Low End, sadly the original site/hub for this has become a muddy water where you likely to be throwing money away on scams and schemes. Those that have had the misfortune of communicating with me over the past 10 or less years I have been involved in the industry will know my feeling about all this so i will leave that there.

Originally LowEndSpirit was a hub for some of the first NAT (shared IP) virtual servers and containers available, it was an at cost (usually a loss in reality) community project, this allowed people access to very cheap services with IP6 and NAT IP4 usually with 128 or 256MB of ram a number of hosts got involved in this and to this day some great hosts are still providing or backing up services around the world such as MrVm, RansomIT services and Gullo Net

The LES NAT project exploded quickly and sadly it also blew up a few of the original hosts trying to offer it on a more commercial basis, these days it is a fairly common product offering, people took the idea and made it a better experience all around even offering end-user support in some instances.

The word LES became synonymous with a NAT or shared IP server which was creating some confusion and frustration but the community was still active to some degree and with the ever-increasing scams and deliberate misdirections going on over at lowendbox/talk I took the decision to fork the community and give a safer option/place to exist in.

Now LowEndSpirit is open to all hosts (with some checks and verification) to post in a more open market place, the majority will happen over on the forums, link in the top bar, but i will post offers here occasionally from hosts offering something worth paying attention too.

The community here grew quickly but the old lowendspirit site still being up is creating some understandable confusion so this is the replacement.

That is the overview as to why this place exists and a brief history, feel free to take part in the discussions.

Hosts/Service providers if you want offers listed, please see the About/FAQ/Contact link on the right.