Dear All,
I’ve given up the hope of running self hosted on Windows Server…
Could anybody recommend a Linux VPS host solely for hosting Invoice Ninja?
Many thanks,
You could try DotBlock. Haven’t used them personally, but I know a few colleagues who speak highly of them. Most of their systems are in the US, but they do have an NL datacenter for EU customers.
Digital Ocean might be another option. Pretty sure they have EU datacenters as well.
Happy to provide space on our servers for you to test. We’re currently running 2-3 white label installations of Invoice Ninja without any issues at all.
We’re also UK based.
As a note if you are uncomfortable with setting up a Linux server you probably shouldn’t run a VPS. You will need to make sure to lock the firewall down quite well using iPtables or another form of method plus of course your webserver and other dependecies like SSL, PHP, Memcached, etc.
You could look into a managed VPS or a self managed VPS but with a cpanel image for easier management of the web server (although the other aspects would still be on you).
Alternatively many people have great success with Shared hosting. Here is a list of hosts that support Let’s Encrypt so you can find one that also provides SSL for the entire site (payment fields are hosted by your payment gateway).
https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/web-hosting-who-support-lets-encrypt/6920
Best of luck
We currently provide free SSL for our clients too.
On that note (security, ip-tables etc), is it possible to block access to the main Invoice Ninja login to all but speficied IP addresses, and allow access to the customer portal part of it to other specified ip addresses?
I’m looking more closely at Amazon Lightsail and Linode. If anyone has any comments on these, please do post. Remember I’m looking for UK (i.e. probably London) based presence.
I appreciate the comments and offers on this thread. I do have a high level of windows server experience and I do intend to follow the guides on securing the server with failtoban, SSH, firewall etc.
I personally don’t like the thought of using shared hosting this application.
I understand your hesitation of using shared hosting for this platform. I would add however that all data is stored in an SQL database. A proper setup would have the database setup with a user and password. So on the shared vs private space the data is essentially protected in much the same way. The catch though is if you miss a step in setting up or forgetting to update critical components of your own VPS they could be vulnerable to security issues ie: PHP and OpenSSL. A shared platform would manage all that for you.
With that said a VPS or other cloud based solution is worth consideration if your willing to spend hours on this and reminders to check and update components. To answer your question yes IP tables can lock all access except for a specific IP. However all your clients would not be able to access their invoices. The proper solution with IP Tables/firewall is to lock all ports down (including pinging) on the server but leave port 443 (HTTPS) for invoice ninja then have a separate email server and use SMTP in Invoice ninja to send from it.
A third option worth consideration would be to have the site hosted on a shared platform but the SQL database remotely hosted. Then lock out all access to that SQL database server with the exception of the IP (or proxy access) for your shared webhost/VPS. So even if they got your cred for the SQL database they couldn’t access it unless they were able to do it from the shared host. There are a number of webhosts on that let’s encrypt list that offer dedicated IPs for an additional cost.
These are just suggestions. At the core Invoice Ninja is just a website that uses SQL and a few other small modules. So any multitude of solutions are available to you in the same way they would be for any other website.
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