New Dollie partners often ask if they can provide their own servers and use those servers for their customer sites. This article will provide you with some background on what this involves, what the requirements are, and lastly the implications this has when building your platform with Dollie.

Question: Can I bring my own server(s) (BYOS) that will be used to host my customer websites?

Yes you can. Our Dollie Private Cloud was built to be cloud agnostic. Meaning we can connect any of your servers with our Private Cloud. That being said this feature is only available for our Enterprise partners. This is because we've made a conscious decision to allow you to build platforms at scale, and just adding any server to it would not set you up for success or scalability.

Question: Why is it Enterprise only? There are lots of other services that allow me to host a couple of WordPress sites on a server I manage. Why not with Dollie?

With Dollie we're taking a different approach. We are simply not in the business of selling you hosting control panels or self-service hosting management tools for WordPress. Here is our comparison page with SpinupWP that goes into this further. Unlike traditional hosting or server management solutions, Dollie works closely with you to find the perfect configuration for your needs.

Our interest is making your business succeed, and helping you scale on an infrastructure built for scale. Our Private Cloud was originally built for Enterprise usage and we strongly believe that using just any server as the foundation for your white-label platform is a recipe for disaster once your platform starts to grow. If you have just a couple of websites and you want to host them on your own server, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Check out SpinupWP, GridPane or many of these awesome solutions! But if you want to bring your own servers to our Dollie Private Cloud we have set some ground rules to set you up for success and growth.

We believe that our infrastructure and technology provides you with a distinct competitive advantage, particularly for those looking to grow and scale their business quickly.

Question: So what are the requirements for connecting my own servers to the Dollie Private Cloud?

Here are the ground rules.

• Your servers have to be highly performant with minimum specs to ensure stability and performance.
• They need to be set up with specific configurations that our team will provide to you.
• Our team needs to have full access to them to monitor and maintain them to provide you with pro-active support.

Question: What are the costs for bringing my own servers?

Here are the base costs that you need to expect when bringing your own servers.

• The costs of the servers themselves.
• A monthly recurring setup & maintenance fee to add your servers to the Dollie Private Cloud
• Either a per-site, per-customer or revenue sharing fee based on our agreed upon payment structure.

We would love to give you fixed pricing and easy answers to complicated questions, but at this point we simply do not know the platform you're trying to build on our Private Cloud. Here is just one example scenario to clarify the complexity of pricing and costs.

Let's say you're building an eCommerce platform where each site has WooCommerce, dozens of plugins and is catered to high-volume sellers. This would mean that each of your sites might require 8GB of RAM, multiple PHP workers and more. This would mean you'd need more servers and your costs would be higher than for example providing simply boutique websites for local businesses.

Question: Is there are maximum limit to how many sites I can deploy onto my own servers?

Yes, Dollie recommends deploying a maximum of 100 sites (Pods) per server to ensure optimal performance, stability, and resource management. This limit helps avoid resource contention, ensures efficient backup and update processes, and maintains security and network efficiency for each WordPress instance hosted on your server. For more in-depth explanation of this, please read here.

Question: This sounds pretty involved. So what if I don't bring my own servers? What are the drawbacks?

Honestly, there are none. We truly only recommend bringing your own servers if there is a hard requirement in your (enterprise) organisation to have your sites stored in a specific location. Your platform can scale to thousands of sites, in multiple geographical locations and with backups going to your own storage buckets without having to provide us with your own servers. This goes back to our core philosophy of taking care of everything regarding infrastructure and scale, so you can focus on growing your business. Our Private Cloud is only available for our partners, it's built from the ground up for WordPress at scale. We have a fantastic partnership with OVH using their dedicated bare metal servers fine-tuned for performance in multiple geographical locations. Each partner on our Private Cloud is already set up for success as soon as you launch your first site.

Out of the box we already provide you with sensible and scalable configurations for your sites, hosted on fantastic dedicated nodes without breaking the bank. Every site on Dollie is containerised, meaning they have dedicated resources available to them and are isolated from each other.

Question: Instead of bringing my own server, would it be possible to lease a dedicated server from Dollie?

Absolutely! For enterprise/custom scenarios we also provide dedicated servers whereby you pay for the server separately and we take care of the maintenance/management for you.

Question: Alright, I'd like to have a conversation about the possibilities!

We'd love to! Book a meeting with our team and we're happy to talk about your options!