¶ About websites at May First
May First operates its own web hosting infrastructure designed to prioritize flexibility, resilience, performance, and security for member websites.
Features of May First web hosting infrastructure:
- Everything you need to host websites based on Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and other popular content management systems.
- Automated Wordpress installs and updates
- Free and automatic TLS (https) certificate creation for your domain using the Let's Encrypt non-profit certificate authority
- Automated intrusion detection to block suspicous or abusive requests targetting your website
- Create users with ssh and sftp access to directly manage files on the web server and install software
- Optional server caching to increase performance and speed
- Disaster recovery backups (limited to 10 days)
- Free software based web servers and operating systems managed by staff
¶ Web hosting infrastructure overview
See the full diagram of web hosting infrastructure
Member websites hosted on our infrastructure depend on the configuration and connections between the following components:
- May First control panel
- DNS nameservers and records
- Web proxy servers
- Web hosting servers
¶ Creating websites in the May First control panel
Read a more complete overview of the May First control panel to learn about accessing, navigating and managing resources and services through the May First control panel.
¶ Hosting orders
We recommend creating a separate hosting order for each website. Each hosting order groups and provides access to manage the following services related to websites.
¶ DNS records
Configuring your domain to use May First DNS nameservers is recommended.
Proper configuration of DNS records direct web traffic for your domain to the correct server(s) to reach your website.
¶ Web configuration
The Web configuration interface allows you to define the domains that should be used for your website and enable https encryption. These settings must align with your DNS settings.
Through the Web configuration interface you can also configure more advanced details about how the web server should process requests to your website. When changes are submitted to the Web configuration interface the control panel writes these changes to a configuration file for the Apache2 web server process on your host.
¶ Web applications
The control panel can make installation of popular content management systems for your website like Wordpress, Drupal or Backdrop easier by downloading these software to your website files folder on your web hosting server. Additional steps are needed to complete the installation.
¶ Server access
Grant users permission to access your websites files directly over ssh or sftp to access or install your website files manually.
¶ Databases
Create MySQL or Postgres databases and users for your website software.
¶ Scheduled jobs
Manually define recurring cron jobs or processes that should be run for your website or kept active continually.