WordPress
All our sites are running on WordPress, the largest CMS (Content Management System) on the Internet today. We are running most of our sites in a couple of different Multisites (for our internal sites, for our external clients, for development/staging).
DigitalOcean
We are using DigitalOcean's VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) to host our web sites. They are located in Holland for best possible access times in Europe. We are usually using a droplet with 1 GB RAM, 1 Core processor, 30 GB SSD disk. On that we can run 2 or 3 Multisites depending on the number of subsites (usually 5-10).
We run Ubuntu LTS as our operating system.
ServerPilot
To handle the stack (the programs running a web server) we use the Coach plan on ServerPilot.io. I also gives us supervision of the CPU, memory and hard disk space. It installs (2018) among other things PHP 5.4-7.2, Apache, Nginx, and MySQL. It also handles our SSL certificate for the https protocol.
Toolset
A fantastic set of plugins to setup Custom Post Types, Maps, Views, and Layout for WordPress.
The more we use it, the more impressed we are with the flexibility and stability.
A few examples from this site
- Custom Post Types shown on a map with filtration
- Custom Masonry grid (using masonry.js) with Toolset Content Templates
Multilingual
We use WPML for our translation control. It is very advanced but integrates with the formidable Toolset, see above.
CMS Commander
Used for supervision, maintenance and backup of all our sites from one central web site. Invaluable to keep everything updated easily.
Genesis Theme Framework
We have chosen to work with Genesis on our sites. It's a WordPress theme framework made by Studiopress. Genesis is considered to be very stable and SEO friendly.
Themes
StudioPress makes their own child themes for the Genesis framework.
We also have themes from Imagely. We use one of them here at adolfsson.photo (Expedition with a lot of tweaking with Toolset).
Plugins
One of the most important plugins we use is Media Library Assistant by David Lingren. If you have more than 50 images on your site you NEED this plugin.
Cloudflare CDN
Our Content Delivery Network solution to decrease loading times from all over the globe. It also helps against hacker attacks and off-loads our own servers.
Disclaimer
Some of the links above are affiliate links so if you buy through them, we get a small commission, thanks.