How we moved away from Bluehost & Cpanel to a more modern stack! — Part 1

Let’s start with the why!

Back in 2017, when we started Octalogic Tech, our programming language of choice was PHP since that is what we were taught in school, and to be fair, it was quite a versatile language. Server-side rendering as well as client-side scripting using the same language, making it quite an excellent language to learn and master for beginners and really gets you through the door.

We started with raw PHP and then made our way up to a framework like Codeigniter and everything was good. We eventually built our site out with the same tech and then we needed a place to host it as well, that’s when we went with the classic GoDaddy hosting. Cheap, easy, and pretty much the goto hosting service. In our naivety, we didn’t realize that setting up emails is going to be a pain in the @$3.

If you’ve ever set up GoDaddy emails with shared hosting, you’ll know it’s not easy. There’s no API you can work with, it’s just plain old SMTP and you’ll have to try a bunch of combinations before you can get the credentials along with the host correct. If you have never set up something like this and have had the honor of working with an API, thank your lucky stars!

Once you did get it right though, that wasn’t the end of your issues, what we noticed then was, a lot of our emails would end up in spam when sent out which is not great for a company and it turns out the reason is, due to it being a shared hosting, the IP address from which the emails are sent out, are also shared. This culminates in situations where a bad actor could ruin it for everyone on that pool due to IP sharing since the IP would be blacklisted for spam and getting it out of a blacklist was almost impossible for a shared system since you don’t really have any sort of indication that you are the owner of the server, which technically, you aren’t.

We soon shifted our services over to Bluehost and that was better; well for a bit though I would say that that was mainly due to our business not expanding as much in the initial few years. Once we started growing, we soon ran into a similar issue where most of our emails, if not all, would end up in the spam or flagged, all over again, and that’s never a good conversation starter.

That’s pretty much when we decided that it was time to shift over to Gsuite and get our infra-updated. Don’t get me wrong, Cpanel is great but it’s a lot better when you can automate the deployment using CI/CD that does not include ftp’ing into a server to deploy files. And it was about time we sunset most of our legacy code.

This is the way!

With that out of the way, stay tuned to see how we shifted over.

Spoiler alert: It was a really smooth migration.