Self-Hosted WordPress Optimized Runtime on Docker (SWORD)

The open-source, self-hosted alternative to FlyWP and SpinupWP:
Slash your hosting cost with SWORD.

We are building a lightweight, high-performance control panel to deploy and manage WordPress sites using Docker.

It’s designed for developers and agencies who want the speed and isolation of containerized hosting without paying monthly fees for SaaS management panels. Also for developers and agencies who want more control over their infrastructure.

The Problem

Managing WordPress at scale often leaves you with two options:

1. Managed Hosting (e.g. Kinsta, WPEngine): Can have very good performance and is easy to use, but very expensive and limited control.
2. Unmanaged VPS (e.g. DigitalOcean, Hetzner): Cheap, but requires manual command-line configuration. It’s a pain to set up caching, SSL, and distinct database users for 50+ sites manually. And managing/maintaining a lot of sites this way becomes a major pain.

SaaS Control Panels (like FlyWP, RunCloud, SpinupWP) bridge this gap, but they introduce a “middleman tax”. You pay a monthly subscription just to manage your own servers. Plus, you rely on their dashboard being online to manage your infrastructure. And you have less control over how the infrastructure is built.

The Solution

“Project SWORD” is a self-hosted dashboard that sits on one of your servers. It turns a raw Linux (Ubuntu) server into a high-performance WordPress hosting suite.

• Docker-Based Isolation: Every site gets its own container. If one site gets hacked or crashes, it doesn’t touch the others. (Similar to FlyWP)
• Performance by Default: We don’t just install Apache/PHP. We provision a tuned stack: Nginx + FastCGI Cache + Redis Object Cache + MariaDB.

Zero Monthly Fees And Full Control: You own the code. You host the panel. You control the data.

Target Audience

• DevOps/Sysadmin Wizard: Someone who loves Nginx configs, Docker Compose networking, and optimizing PHP-FPM pools.
• Backend Developers: To build the back-end logic and API that talks to the Docker daemon.
• Frontend Developers: To build a slick “SaaS-quality” dashboard.

Join us to build the ultimate high-performance hosting stack for WordPress websites. Owned and controlled by yourself, not a corporation!

Hackathon Goals

1. The Dashboard: A clean UI where you click “Create New Site”, enter a domain (e.g., client-site.com), and hit “Deploy”.
2. The Orchestrator: The backend receives the request and:
   • Spins up a Docker container for WordPress (PHP-FPM) on a linked server.
   • Creates a separate MariaDB database and user.
   • Configures an Nginx Reverse Proxy with FastCGI caching rules pre-applied, optimized for WordPress.
   • Spins up a Redis container for object caching and links it to WP.
   • Requests a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate automatically.
3. The Outcome: A live, HTTPS-secured WordPress site that loads very fast.

This is a long-term project we intend to use at Synio in the future! Additional goals, but probably post-hackathon, are:
Cloud API integration, DNS automation, Backups via BorgBackup, Security, WP management, Staging environments…