Self-hosted PageMotor on Vultr: SME

One serious site, on a VPS you control. The right-sized middle between the $12 solo plan and the $55 agency box.

Who this is for

• You run one busy PageMotor site: consultancy, booking-based practice, small shop, service business.
• You, or someone on your team, can read a Terminal window. Or you are happy to let Claude Code do the bash work.
• You want a box with enough headroom to grow into without migrating again in twelve months.

The plan

Vultr Cloud Compute, High Performance. 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 100 GB NVMe. $24 per month.

• 4 GB RAM handles AI plugins, image-heavy galleries and busy admin sessions without stress.
• 100 GB NVMe is enough for years of uploads, invoices and database growth.
• Dedicated CPU not required at this size. High Performance shared CPU is plenty for one site.

Auto Backups at $4.80 per month. On production, always enable.

If sustained daily traffic regularly exceeds a few thousand visitors, step up to 4 vCPU, 8 GB, 180 GB NVMe at $48 per month.

Sign up for Vultr

Sign up through our referral link: vultr.com/?ref=9892518-9J. That gives you $300 of free Vultr credit at no extra cost to you.

What the $300 credit covers

On the $24 per month SME plan, that is roughly 12 months of hosting. You need to link a valid card or PayPal to activate the credit, and the unused portion expires 30 days after signup, so pick the plan you actually intend to run.

Full disclosure

If you stay on Vultr past 30 days and spend at least $100, we earn a $100 referral credit from Vultr. It costs you nothing and does not change the price you pay. You still get the same $300 credit whether you click our link or Vultr’s generic signup, so we would rather you use the link and help fund the next round of PageMotor hosting tests.

What to tick on the Vultr signup screen

Setting	Pick
Server type	Cloud Compute
CPU & Storage	High Performance, NVMe
Location	Closest Vultr region to your visitors
Image	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64
Plan	2 vCPU / 4 GB / 100 GB at $24 per month
Auto Backups	Enable
IPv6	Enabled (free)
SSH Keys	Your ed25519 public key, uploaded before first boot
Hostname	Readable, for example pm-sme-01

Generate an ed25519 key on your Mac if you do not have one:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519

Claude Code runs the bootstrap

Once the VPS is up and your DNS A record points at it:

1. Install Claude Code from claude.com/claude-code.
2. Download PageMotor 0.8.2b from the forum, unzip locally.
3. In Claude Code, paste:

I have a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 VPS at [VPS_IP].
I can SSH as root using my ed25519 key.

My domain is [yoursite.com]. A record already points at the VPS IP.
My PageMotor 0.8.2b core files are in [~/Downloads/pagemotor-0.8.2b/].

Please follow the full bootstrap at
https://documentation.elmspark.com/hosting/vultr/
end-to-end. Stop after the seeder runs and before admin registration.
British English. No em dashes.

Edit the three bracketed placeholders, hit Enter, watch it run. About 30 minutes from empty box to live PageMotor.

Plugins you will want on day one

After registering your admin account at /admin/, ask Claude Code to install:

• EP Email and EP Newsletter SendGrid (transactional email and broadcast).
• EP GDPR (cookie banner and privacy policy for UK and EU sites).
• EP Password Reset (so password resets do not become your job).
• EP Diagnostics (tells you what is wrong before your visitors do).

Settings that matter at this scale

• SendGrid SMTP. Vultr blocks outbound port 25. You will use SMTP relay. Free tier covers most SME volumes.
• fastcgi_read_timeout 600. Claude Code sets this. Verify in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ if you do the bootstrap by hand.
• Auto Backups on. $4.80 per month for sleep at night.
• Off-site backup of user-content and DB on top of Vultr’s snapshots. Weekly restic run to S3-compatible storage is standard practice.

Growth path

The $24 plan comfortably handles one busy SME site. Once you add a second site or traffic grows:

• Second SME-size site on the same box: fine, same plan.
• Sustained four-figure daily visitors: step up to $48 per month.
• Four or more sites: move to the $55 agency box. See Agency, self-hosted.

Not sure you want to run the box?

Managed hosting is the same setup with us handling provisioning, patching, monitoring and support.