Custom Application Hosting

Somewhere sensible to run the thing you had built

Bespoke applications need more than a server with the right runtime on it. They need deployments that can be undone, jobs that are monitored, and someone who understands the application when it misbehaves.

Talk about your application

Stacks

What we run day to day

We are not precious about the language. We are fairly opinionated about deployments, monitoring and backups.

Laravel & PHP

Our own house stack, so we know where the bodies are buried — queues, Horizon, scheduled tasks, Octane and the usual deployment traps.

Node.js

Express, Nest and the rest, with process management, memory monitoring and sane handling of the things Node does when it runs out of it.

Python

Django, Flask and FastAPI behind a proper WSGI or ASGI server, with Celery workers monitored rather than merely started.

.NET

ASP.NET Core on Linux or Windows, with SQL Server where the application expects it, and licensing dealt with as part of the arrangement.

Something else? Ruby, Go, Java and containerised workloads are all fine. Tell us what it is and we will tell you whether we are the right home for it.

Deployments

Push, build, test, deploy, and be able to undo it

The single biggest difference between an application that is pleasant to run and one that is not.

Commit

Your developers push to a branch. Nothing about their workflow needs to change.

Build

Dependencies installed, assets compiled, artefacts produced in a clean environment rather than on the live server.

Test

Your test suite runs. If it fails, the deployment stops here rather than in front of your customers.

Stage

Deployed to an environment that mirrors production, with its own data, for a final look.

Release

Promoted to production with zero-downtime switching, and a rollback that has been used in anger.

Running it

The unglamorous parts that decide whether it stays up

Queues and workers

Workers supervised, restarted on failure, and alerting when a queue backs up beyond a threshold you agree.

Scheduled tasks

Cron and scheduler runs monitored for completion, so a silently failing nightly job gets noticed the same night.

Log aggregation

Application logs collected and searchable, so diagnosing an issue does not begin with SSHing into a box.

Database care

Backups, slow-query visibility, index sanity and a restore path that has been rehearsed.

Secrets handling

Credentials in environment configuration and a secrets store, not in the repository.

Certificates

Issued and renewed automatically, with expiry monitored independently in case renewal fails.

FAQs

Application hosting questions

This is a common situation and yes. We start by working out what the application actually is — the stack, the dependencies, how it gets deployed, what it talks to — and write that down, because usually nobody has. From there we can host and maintain it, and tell you honestly what state it is in.

Coffee Cup Solutions has a software development team, so yes, when you want it. Plenty of customers keep their own developers and use us purely for the infrastructure and deployment pipeline. Both arrangements are fine.

Usually Git-based: push to a branch, the pipeline builds, tests and deploys. Staging first, production on approval, with a rollback that has been tested rather than assumed. If you already have CI you like, we will plug into it rather than replace it.

Yes — queue workers, schedulers and cron jobs are monitored as first-class parts of the application. A failed nightly job raises an alert. That sounds obvious, and it is routinely the thing nobody set up.

We size for normal load and design headroom for the peaks you can predict. For genuinely spiky workloads we will build in load balancing and the ability to add capacity, and be upfront that this costs more than a single server.

Tell us what it's built on

Stack, traffic, database size, and how it currently gets deployed. That's usually enough for us to tell you what we'd do and what it would cost.

Start a conversation 0118 384 2175

Or email hello@coffeecupsolutions.com