Internal tool hosting

The least glamorous PHP in the building, and the most load-bearing.

The application only a company's own staff uses: an admin panel, an intranet, a stock or logistics tool. PHP holds an enormous share of these, written quickly, years ago, by whoever was available.

# Low traffic, high consequence

20 concurrent users at peak, nothing on weekends. By every metric a hosting dashboard reports, the application looks idle. When it stops, invoices aren't raised and shipments aren't booked, and the manual fallback was forgotten years ago.

Load-based reasoning gives the wrong answer here. The PHP component and the database run through the working day whether anyone logs in or not, and that, plus backups, is the bill.

# Wired into the other systems

An internal tool is rarely alone. It reads orders from the ERP, posts labels to the warehouse, mails a report before the shift starts. Each environment has one fixed outgoing IP, so the firewall on the other side has a single address to allowlist. Non-standard ports open per environment from the dashboard, and scheduled imports and exports run as cron jobs in the jobs component. Persistent connections and WebSockets are not supported.

# Old code, current runtime

Age in the application is fine. A CakePHP or CodeIgniter code base nobody has touched in years deploys like any other — git push, Composer, done. Age in the runtime is the limit: the platform starts at PHP 8.2, and an application pinned below that needs work first.

That work happens in a second environment. Same code, newer PHP, proven there before anyone in the company sees it.

# Why fortrabbit?

Because boring is the entire specification, and boring on purpose is what fortrabbit has been doing for over a decade — managed PHP, bootstrapped, still run by the people who built it. A current runtime nobody in-house has to patch, daily backups behind data that exists nowhere else, and support answered by the operators of the platform rather than a ticket desk. That last one matters more than it should, because the developer who wrote the tool usually left years ago.