Mautic Community Forums

What's the best way to deploy MAUTIC; new installation?

General Discussion
#1

Hello! I’m looking to deploy Mautic for our small non-profit. What’s the best / easiest / future proof way to do this for a non-programmer like myself? (I can follow instruction really well, but I’m not a coder.). I’ve been reading and reading, but it’s hard to find a starting point with a clear pathway for someone like myself.

Considerations:

  1. Deciding where to host it (again, for a non-techie). (Still deciding between Digitalocean, Amazon Lightsail, or alternatives).

  2. Docker? Is this practical (for a non-techie) way to use ONE Digitalocean or Lightsail instance for a few installs (of Mautic or a couple Wordpress sites) without paying for multiple instances? I know there’s software to install in instances that do this, but that’s another monthly subscription I’d like to try and avoid).

  3. Can one install of mautic be used for a couple different websites? (Tracking, user interaction, etc) … or one install for one website?

  4. I’ve heard the “one-click-installs” such as bitnami, etc, are a bad idea (less than optimal installation, troubleshooting it in the future, etc.) … is this still the case in 2021? I’d love to one-click, but not if it’s going to give future issues.

  5. Is self-hosting Mautic like this practical for a non-coder like myself to venture into, or am I going to pull my hair out at some point and run in to a dead end and better off not to go there…?

  6. Is there an updated / current step-by-step guide for a non-techie to follow and get everything set up with the above considerations in mind?

  7. The future of Mautic – any worries here for long-term usage? (Was reading the upgrade to v3 issues, etc… Wondering if a non-coder is just going to be able to keep it updated / maintained / etc.)

Thank you!

#2

Hi @Paul

Firstly welcome to the forum. I will try and answer all of your questions in order.

As a start I would be happy to install Mautic for you if you are a non-profit. I could get you up and running in under 1 hour.

In terms of doing it yourself the best reference I have come across is: Install Mautic Self-Hosted Email Marketing Platform on Ubuntu 20.04 Server - LinuxBabe

  1. Hosting: I run on Digital Ocean. We have over 50+ servers running Mautic there and it is pretty stable and relatively well priced. I can tell you if your DB is not that big you can even get away with a $5 server. I will send you a link that you can use and you will get $100 credit for the first two months.

  2. I have never used anything but native installations, so I am not the best person to answer here.

  3. Yes. This takes some configuration inside Mautic in terms of tags/ custom fields.

  4. Once again, not the right person to answer here.

  5. If you have arrived here, I think you are pretty safe going self hosted.

  6. My initial link will take you through it step by step. Fail Safe

  7. Mautic is a strong community and the community are pretty pro-active in contributing to the growth of Mautic, there are many business’s based on this code set and in my opinion it is a great option. It is not a plug and play like MailChimp or some of the others, however it is much more cost affective and has way more power!!

Feel free to take me up on my initial offer by either commenting here or sending me a PM or mike@surge.media.

On a final note you will find a fortune of help here in the forums, once you get going and run into questions feel free to ask whatever here, people are extremely helpful and want to sort out problems.

Regards,

Mike

1 Like
#3

Hi Mike,

Thank you so much for replying and offering your help to get us up and running – really very kind of you and much appreciated!

I’m thinking to actually do the process myself (if possible) so I can be at least a little bit familiar with how things generally work – but I’d very much appreciate getting advice / instructions from you as far as specifics…

Thanks for pointing me to

  1. How would you say that tutorial compares with this one?

Or this one:

Mautic 3 Installation on Ubuntu 20.04 with PHP 7.3 and MySQL 5.7](Mautic 3 Installation on Ubuntu 20.04 with PHP 7.3 and MySQL 5.7

  1. Once the best guide is pinpointed, would you do any steps differently (or add certain steps) if you were to install it yourself using that particular guide? If so would you be able to specify what you’d change in the form of steps so I could do that?

  2. I notice these guides are installations of the latest version of Mautic 3. Is version 3 stable without needing to worry about issues, etc and thus it’s recommended to use v3 these days?

  3. I just watched a YouTube video of someone saying to stay away from Mautic because it sucks hours and days of your life away just trying to get it to work properly and fight off upgrade issues – such as implementing double-opt-in emails. (Video about ten months old). Is this still the case at this stage with Mautic 3?

I love the idea of what Mautic can do – I just don’t want to set something up that requires continual expertise beyond my capacity and time to continually research?

My alternative would be Sendy … which obviously can’t compare to Mautic … but just wanting to make sure I’m not opening a continual can of worms by choosing Mautic?

(Sorry, I know you answered this question by saying if I found this site, I should be ok … is this based on recent updates with Mautic 3 and more stability? Issues someone was experiencing 10 months ago, are those still valid?)

Thank you!

#4

Hi folks,

Welcome @Paul to the Mautic Community!

Jumping in to let you know that we are aware that the documentation and resources for newcomers to Mautic are rather lacking and we are actively working on a Strategic Initiative which focuses on both the practicalities of the install process (e.g. improving the install/upgrade process itself), and the documentation/resources for new users.

I would love to have your insights and involvement in this process if you would like to help us make this better for everybody!

#5

Hey Paul.

Good idea to get into it yourself.

  1. I would stick with LinuxBabe as this is what I used many years ago and used it repeatedly until I was proficient doing it without a tutorial.

  2. Nope - 100% comprehensive. I did find an error with his latest tutorial which I commented on and he corrected the tutorial immediately.

  3. IMO Yes. I stayed with version 2.x for a few months after 3.x has come out. It has not been out long enough that I have migrated nearly all of my clients to 3.x. It is well supported and there are periodic releases of bug fixes and new features.

  4. Everyone has their own learning abilities, some people are more apt to picking something up than others. No doubt Mautic can be a frustrating instrument for some, but then so said can Facebook for certain people as well, to creating a simple email address :-). Mautic is like any other advanced Automated Marketing System, you need to learn how to use it and extract the huge value there, it is not MailChimp, but it has powers far beyond Mailchimp. The example of the double-opt in emails is a relatively simple campaign that if asked on the forum over here would be answered within a day (along with full explanations)

We all need to make our own decisions :slight_smile: Mine has been to focus on Mautic, I have used Oracle, Watson IBM (previously. Silverpop), ActiveCampaign and many others, they all have their learning curve, in terms of flexibility and robustness I choose Mautic.

Let me know how things go for you.

Good Luck,

Mike

2 Likes
#6

Thank you RCheesley for the welcome. (Yes, an on-boarding set of information with step by step suggestions and instructions and best practices would be invaluable for new people like me … I’m sure many non-coders take one look toward Mautic but never go for it due to not having clarity).

Thank you again Mike for the response.

I guess my last concern is: Once I follow the Linuxbabe setup guide and it’s all working — is it all straight forward for Wordpress and email integration and future upgrades, maintenance, etc? Or can I expect to run in to issues that requires fairly regular time spent just to figure out (being a non coder) how to overcome issues?

Like I said, I don’t mind DIY as long as there’s a clear set of instructions to follow and it doesn’t take major continuous investments of time.

#7

Hey Paul,

If you are using Wordpress, there is a free Mautic WP plugin that will take care of tracking and also provide the ability to call forms and focus-items using shortcodes.

If you are using WooCommerce then there is a WooCommerce Mautic Integration Plugin that has both a free and a paid version. Ultimately you would need to move to the paid version which is around $99 one off license fee.

But once you have your instance up and running there is no coding needed, it is just learning how to drive the vehicle to it’s maximum capacity.

1 Like
#8

Thank you, Mike! Much appreciated…!

1 Like