We are happy to announce our third EasyEngine Expert, VirtuBox LLC. The Paris-based agency provide managed hosting and server support services.
We had a chance to interview Thomas Suchon, co-founder at VirtuBox. He has been a System Administrator for the past 5 years and, as you will read, is passionate about what he does.
You can check out VirtuBox’s EasyExperts profile in our archives.
Interview
Tell us a bit about your background in hosting / server management
We have launched VirtuBox in 2011. We was providing virtual servers with Windows at the beginning but we have quickly replaced it with Linux. Now all our infrastructure is based on Linux, with Proxmox VE as hypervisor, and EasyEngine as websites management tool.
When did you realize that you are passionate about hosting and server management?
When I realized that I was spending most of my free time browsing all the communities about server management, self-hosting and other sysadmin stuffs. When I’m not working on linux servers, most of the time I’m looking for something else to setup or to try.
Where are you based out of? Do you have a collaborative team? Tell us a bit more about your team.
We are based at Orléans, a city next Paris in France. I’m working with 2 colleagues at VirtuBox. I do the sysadmin part, and they do the development and integration. Each of us has his own expertise and that’s why it is always a pleasure to start working on a new project together.
How did you discover EasyEngine?
I was looking for a way to speed-up my WordPress websites, and to manage them properly. I have tried several others solutions, including almost all the open-source control panels, and some command line tools like centminmod. But most of them was slower than a custom LAMP stack. So that’s by reading some articles about Pagespeed integration with Nginx, that I have discovered EasyEngine. Now, I’m not looking for an alternative anymore !
What do you use EasyEngine mainly for?
We are using EasyEngine to setup almost all our servers. If our customers doesn’t require to have a web interface to manage their websites, we use EasyEngine to setup WordPress, Magento, Prestashop or any other web application.
Any interesting situations where EasyEngine saved your time / energy / resources?
When I have decided to try Ghost instead of WordPress, it was really easy with EasyEngine to create a reverse-proxy and then I have just done some change to use an SSL certificate. That’s also true to use a domain name with a Docker App.
Why would you recommend using EasyEngine?
Because in my opinion, it’s currently the easiest way to setup WordPress on a fresh VPS, with an optimized configuration, which include all the security settings required to make WordPress safer.
For beginners it’s a very good way to learn how to manage themselve their websites on a VPS and for a sysadmin, it’s a way to deploy any web application faster and easier with a clean configuration
Links: EasyExperts Profile | EasyExperts Program