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Hosting Architecture

Document: 24-hosting-architecture.md
Version: 1.0.0

Purpose

This document defines the hosting architecture used across all Rundown projects.

Hosting provides the production environment in which applications run. A standardized hosting strategy ensures consistency across projects, simplifies deployments, reduces operational complexity, and enables predictable maintenance procedures.

This document establishes the infrastructure standards for all production and staging environments.

Hosting Philosophy

Infrastructure should be:

Hosting decisions should prioritize operational simplicity over unnecessary infrastructure complexity.

Standard Hosting Platform

Rundown standardizes on:

Hostinger VPS

Recommended baseline specification:

The selected VPS should be appropriate for the expected workload while allowing room for future growth.

Responsibilities

The hosting layer owns:

Non-Responsibilities

The hosting layer should not own:

Hosting provides compute resources only.

Standard Operating System

Rundown standardizes on:

Ubuntu LTS

Reasons:

Non-LTS releases should not be used for production environments.

Environment Strategy

Every project should support separate environments.

Minimum environments:

Development

↓

Staging

↓

Production

Each environment should remain isolated.

Production should never be used for testing.

Server Structure

A standard Rundown production server consists of:

Ubuntu LTS
        │
Docker Engine
        │
Coolify
        │
Nginx Reverse Proxy
        │
Application Containers

Each layer has a clearly defined responsibility.

Resource Allocation

Infrastructure should scale according to application requirements.

Typical considerations include:

Avoid provisioning significantly more resources than required.

Scaling Strategy

Rundown follows a progressive scaling strategy.

Order of preference:

  1. Optimize the application.

  2. Optimize the database.

  3. Optimize caching.

  4. Increase VPS resources.

  5. Introduce additional infrastructure only when necessary.

Scaling should be driven by measurable demand rather than anticipation.

Networking

Every production server should:

Domain Management

Cloudflare is the standard DNS provider.

Responsibilities include:

Application hosting remains independent of DNS management.

Storage

Persistent storage should include:

Application containers should remain stateless whenever practical.

High Availability

High availability should only be introduced when business requirements justify the additional complexity.

Most marketing websites and standard ecommerce projects can be reliably hosted on a single VPS.

Redundancy should be introduced incrementally as projects scale.

Cost Management

Infrastructure decisions should balance:

The objective is to provide clients with reliable hosting without unnecessary infrastructure expenses.

Engineering Decision

Standard Hosting Platform

Status: Accepted

Decision

Hostinger VPS running Ubuntu LTS is the standard production hosting environment for Rundown projects.

Reasoning

This architecture provides:

More complex infrastructure should only be introduced when justified by business requirements.

Hosting Checklist

Before provisioning a production server, verify:

Summary

Hosting provides the operational foundation for every Rundown application.

By standardizing on a simple, scalable VPS architecture, Rundown delivers reliable production environments while maintaining low operational costs and minimizing infrastructure complexity.