More advanced PHP applications can have multiple webroots accessed via different subdomains. For example, one is the public website for customers (www.mydomain.com) and another for the staff (accounts.mydomain.com).

For example, Cloudways is advertising support for Yii Framework (https://www.cloudways.com/en/yii-hosting.php). This framework implements the mentioned architecture in the following way:

https://www.yiiframework.com/extension/yiisoft/yii2-app-advanced/doc/guide/2.0/en/structure-directories

There are "frontend" and "backend" modules in the application directory and each of them has a separate webroot. The configuration could look like this:

www.mydomain.com -> /path/to/yii-application/frontend/web/
accounts.mydomain.com -> /path/to/yii-application/backend/web/

This could be even configured on a basic cPanel hosting. I have already asked on the support chat that Cloudways doesn't allow such configuration (not even a workaround). That's a bit shame considering the other more advanced features Cloudways offers otherwise.

The application user does not have write permissions to their own user directory (i.e. ~/). This prevents any application that needs to write to this directory from being run when logged in as an application user, such as git, ssh, npm, etc.

Making the user directory for the application user writable by the application user, so that new files and sub-directories can be created, will solve many issues that myself and others are having running applications when logged in as an application user.

Other feedback ideas this should solve include:

Please enable NPM in SSH when we are using application SSH user
http://feedback.cloudways.com/forums/203824-service-improvement/suggestions/31783177-please-enable-npm-in-ssh-when-we-are-using-applica

give permission to application ssh user to create his own ssh key
http://feedback.cloudways.com/forums/203824-service-improvement/suggestions/19230790-give-permission-to-application-ssh-user-to-create

The current setup seems to be only using nginx as reverse proxy in front of apache/php-fpm.

Right now requests seem to go this way nginx->apache->php-fpm.

We'd like to test with apache completely removed and nginx->php-fpm direct.

We'd like to have a nginx -> php-fpm setup for generating dynamic content on uncached pages for faster performance.

We are able to get twice the page loading speed from a direct setup on Linode with identical specs with Nginx used for php-fpm than the Thunderstack use of Nginx only as a reverse proxy and Apache for php-fpm dynamic content.

When a customer is logged-in to an ecommerce site much more of the content is served dynamically and cannot be cached - so all the caching in the world can only give performance to the static content.

Whereas, using Nginx & php-fpm for the dynamic content generation will give much needed additional performance for the dynamic conten webserver.

Out tests also showed no regressions in functionality with WP/Woo . and 160+ plugins.

Currently when using the git deployment feature, if you delete a previously tracked file and push this change to the server it doesn't delete the file from the server.

This means you're left with lots of legacy files that are no longer needed, and your repo is no longer in sync with your server files.

This can cause issues if you ever wanted to push changes back from the server to git as it would then track the previously deleted files and re-add them to the sever!

I'd assume this to be expected behaviour but there might be a reason if anyone wants to shed some light?

Thanks, Harry.