Craft CMS Deployment and Craft CMS Hosting With Zero Downtime Releases on Your Own Servers

How do you deploy Craft CMS to production?

Deploy Craft CMS by building each release in its own directory, linking the files that must persist, running php craft up and then switching a symlink. Craft's deployment guide describes this atomic pattern and lists what must survive a deploy: the .env file, storage (including storage/backups), uploaded assets such as web/uploads, and the project config in config/project, which lives in git.

On a DeployManage zero downtime site the order is fixed. The panel clones the commit into releases/<timestamp>, links the shared .env and storage/, then runs your deploy script. Front end assets are usually built in CI or committed, so a typical script looks like this:

mkdir -p "$DM_SITE_DIR/shared/cpresources" "$DM_SITE_DIR/shared/uploads"
ln -sfn "$DM_SITE_DIR/shared/cpresources" web/cpresources
ln -sfn "$DM_SITE_DIR/shared/uploads" web/uploads
composer install --no-dev --no-interaction --optimize-autoloader
php craft up --interactive=0
php craft clear-caches/data

Only when every line succeeds does the current symlink move to the new release. Craft takes a database backup before it applies pending migrations, so a failed migration leaves both the old code and a fresh backup in place. The last five releases stay on disk for a rollback.

Which Craft folders must be shared between releases?

Share the .env file, storage/, web/cpresources/ and every local asset volume. storage/ holds runtime files, logs, backups and rebrand images. web/cpresources/ holds the compiled Control Panel resources Craft publishes on first request, and sharing it avoids a burst of slow Control Panel loads after each deploy. Local volumes such as web/uploads hold everything editors upload.

Do not share config/project. Project config is meant to come from git, and craft up applies it to the database on each deploy. If a client asks to add fields on the live site, the answer is a staging environment, not allowAdminChanges in production.

If your assets already live on S3, DigitalOcean Spaces or another remote volume, there is no uploads folder to share, which also makes it possible to run one Craft site on two servers behind a load balancer.

Running the Craft queue on your own server

Craft's default queue runner piggybacks on page requests: at the end of a request it injects a small script that starts a background process. That works on a quiet site and is unreliable on a busy one, because jobs wait for visitors and compete with them for PHP workers.

On your own server you have two better options. Set runQueueAutomatically to false and add php craft queue/listen --verbose as a Supervisor daemon in the panel, remembering that a daemon keeps the old code in memory and needs a restart after a release, which Craft's own docs point out. Or add a one minute cron that runs php craft queue/run from the current directory, which exits when the queue is empty and always starts on the newest release. For most marketing sites the cron is simpler; Commerce stores with heavy email or stock jobs are better on the daemon.

Craft CMS hosting requirements for a VPS

Craft 5 needs PHP 8.2 or later, MySQL 8.0.17 or later with InnoDB, MariaDB 10.4.6 or later, or PostgreSQL 13 or later, at least 256 MB of PHP memory (512 MB recommended) and 200 MB of free disk. It also needs sixteen PHP extensions, including BCMath, Intl, GD, Zip and DOM, and Craft recommends ImageMagick for better image transforms.

Every server DeployManage builds meets those requirements out of the box. In practice a single 2 GB server handles two or three small Craft sites with MySQL on the same box, and a 4 GB server handles five or six. Image transforms are the usual memory spike, so give a site with large photo libraries more headroom or move transforms to a remote volume.

Craft CMS hosting cost on your own servers

The Craft licence is the same wherever you host, except on Craft Cloud, which includes it. Craft Solo is free with one account; Team is $279 per project and Pro is $399 per project, each with a year of updates and $99 a year after that. Budget that line separately for every client site.

Hosting and panel cost, per month, with DigitalOcean Basic Droplets in a US region ($12 for 2 GB, $24 for 4 GB, $48 for 8 GB):

Forge is cheaper than DeployManage in every row, and the table says so on purpose. The reason teams pick DeployManage anyway is the combination in one plan: atomic releases across several servers without a second subscription, 10 seats on Growth, and an audit log of every deploy across every client server. If you are one developer with one Craft site, Forge Hobby on a $12 server is the better buy. For a full breakdown of Craft Cloud's plans see Craft Cloud pricing.

Moving a Craft site from another host

Launch the new server, add the site and connect the repository, then copy the uploads folder into the shared directory with rsync and import a database backup with php craft db/restore. Run a first deploy on a temporary hostname and check the Control Panel, an image transform and a form submission. Lower the DNS TTL a day ahead and switch DNS last. If the old host was Craft Cloud or Servd, move assets off their asset platform first, because the paths change with the volume.