Welcome to RunCloud’s 2024 year in review.

First of all, Happy New Year – here’s to 2025! ♥️

I hope all of you have had an incredible winter break (or Christmas 🎄 break if you celebrate) – and a wonderful New Year’s Eve with family and friends.

As we wrap up the first month of 2025, we want to take a moment to reflect on the past year, and to look ahead to what we’re focusing on for the coming year.

Here’s a quick summary in case you’re here for the first time:

RunCloud is a server management platform that makes it easy to run production-grade infrastructure. Trusted from startups to enterprises – from your favorite indie hackers and WordPress agencies through to world-class hosting companies.

This year, we delivered:

💳 Over 13,254 new server deployments

🕵️ 54 product updates shipped

📈 10,740 Web app (Git & Atomic) deployments

So, without further ado, let’s look back on what a year 2024 was…

Overhauling Our Documentation

We gave our product documentation a facelift, to say the least. And we didn’t stop there! While we were at it, we also re-reviewed every article in our documentation, leading to partial/complete rewrites of almost every single article.

This sets a new standard for our product documentation going forward, and demonstrates our ongoing commitment to making RunCloud as easy as possible to use – outside of continuing to build a product that just “feels right” and “makes sense”.

Overhauling Our Blog

In conjunction with the huge overhaul of our product documentation, we brought our blog into line with the new design, keeping things such as the navigation consistent, and building on top of the same design system.

The final part of the RunCloud marketing site that remains to be consolidated into a newer, overhauled design style that’s indicative of where we’re at is our homepage and other pages at the root (i.e., pricing, about, etc.).

This is something we’re excited to take on this year, so stay tuned!

Shipping V3 of the RunCloud API

This year, RunCloud as a product took a massive leap forward for developers. With the introduction of V3 of the RunCloud API, it’s never been a better time to build with RunCloud.

Companies such as ZipWP, InstaWP, and many others have already been taking advantage of our API to make it much easier to build their platforms powered by RunCloud under the hood.

Learn more in our API documentation here.

Note: For those interested, we’re using Apidog to power our API documentation. This is separate from our primary product documentation – which is a headless WordPress site.

Improving Pricing to Align With Our Direction

With the release of your all-new RunCloud Workspace and version 3 of our API, we updated our pricing plans in line with the direction of RunCloud as a product and company.

This change was initially viewed as controversial, but as the initial reactions faded, we were pleased to re-align with our core audience, who saw why this was a necessary change and, like us, couldn’t be more excited to continue using RunCloud as part of their stack.

RunCloud Turns 7

Towards the end of the year (September), RunCloud turned 7!

Even after 7 years, it feels like we’re just getting started. Most startups don’t make it past 1 year, let alone 3, 5, and now 7. We’re deeply grateful to survive – and thrive, serving thousands of customers in over 100 countries.

Here are some of the values that have carried us through the past 7 years:

  1. Customer-first always. Despite tough competition, we prioritized solving our customers’ immediate needs.
  2. Brand matters. From day one, we invested in building trust and a strong brand – a rare focus in today’s impatient startup world.
  3. Customer satisfaction. We can’t please everyone, but with a 99% CSAT score, we keep learning from the 1% who challenge us.
  4. Flywheel over funnels. We focus equally on existing customers and acquiring new ones, ensuring long-term growth.
  5. Simplicity wins. We respect competitors but focus on crafting a simple, straightforward product that meets real needs.
  6. Value-driven growth. Instead of chasing hype, we channel our energy into improving the product and scaling thoughtfully.

Our biggest lesson is to compete with yourself.

Focus on your customers, build a better product, and stay ethical. The world moves fast, but we can choose to stay grounded and build something meaningful, one step at a time.

We know we have a long way to go, and we are just as ambitious about RunCloud as a product as many of the people in our community who continue to get involved and help shape the direction of the product with their feedback and constructive discussions.

Here’s to a great year ahead. 🫡

Meanwhile, you’ll find a highlight reel below of some of our bigger updates from throughout the year. For a full list of everything that’s new, please refer to our changelog.

And Some More Big Product Updates From This Year

Introducing The RunCloud Workspace

Meet your all-new RunCloud Workspace. Bring your team into RunCloud with fine-grained control over what resources invited team members can see and what specific actions they can perform in your workspace.

Note: To create a workspace, you’ll need to be on a RunCloud Business or Enterprise plan.

Here are some guides to help you get up and running with your new workspace:

Introducing Support for ARM Servers on RunCloud

RunCloud now supports ARM servers – an alternative server architecture offering a more efficient solution with lower power consumption and reduced heat output – ideal for cost-effective, scalable data centers.

Supported Configurations

  • Native NGINX server
  • Native OLS server
  • Containerized NGINX server

Note: Containerized OLS servers are not supported with ARM

The server providers that support direct deployments from your RunCloud dashboard that offer ARM server offerings are Hetzner, AWS EC2, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure.

Introducing Server Storage & Web Application Monitoring

We’re excited to announce that Storage Monitoring has landed!

Today’s release includes a series of updates we know many of you have been waiting for. With RunCloud Monitoring, it’s never been easier to monitor the storage breakdown of your servers – based on web apps, databases, log files, and more.

Learn more about Storage Monitoring on RunCloud here.

And that’s not all! RunCloud Monitoring now also offers web application monitoring, including Slow Script Monitoring, IP Address Hit Monitoring, and Top Path Monitoring:

Automatic Configuration of Access Control Lists for Redis

We’re excited to introduce a new security feature that automatically safeguards your Redis instances using Access Control Lists (ACLs). With this update, RunCloud ensures that your Redis deployments are securely configured by default, providing an additional layer of protection for your data.

This is particularly important if you host multiple web applications on a single server.

Newly-deployed servers and web applications are secured by default.

Note: The minimum agent version is 2.8.9+8.

Learn more and refer to this guide on how to secure existing web applications.

A big thank you goes out to the security researcher – Vladimir Smitka – who performed a series of tests and originally reported this proposed improvement to how Redis works by default on RunCloud.

The setup process may vary slightly due to the individual/custom configurations of existing web apps. Please feel free to get in touch if you run into any issues.

Working with Paddle as a Merchant of Record

You can now pay for your RunCloud subscription using credit/debit cards, PayPal, and Google Pay.

This has been made possible by partnering with Paddle (the complete payments, tax, and subscription solution for SaaS) to process payments and act as our Merchant of Record, allowing us to deliver the best subscription and payment experience for our users worldwide.