17 years helping Canadian businesses
choose better software
About SlickStack
Open-source LEMP script to enhance and simplify WordPress provisioning, performance, and security.
Super easy to use with the installer. You need a very basic level of knowledge using the Ubuntu command line.
Shell/Script/Bash knowledge is required and there is a learning curve to itThere is no fancy-glancy interface but this I can note also as a pro.
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Alternatives Considered:
A godsend of a product for anyone looking for a fast, stable & reliable LEMP stack
Comments: Before working with SlickStack, my company website has used various Wordpress vendors online that ranged from cheap to expensive. And, without a doubt, SlickStack has solved all of our reliability and speed issues we had with other vendors. SlickStack has directly saved our company time and money and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to get the most bang for their buck.
Pros:
SlickStack is so easy to configure, install and maintain. This is true whether you're a novice or a professional. SlickStack takes the guesswork out of maintaining servers and an online presence.
Cons:
There really is nothing to speak of in regards to any Cons. Our experience has been wonderful.
LittleBizzy Response
3 years ago
Montrey, thanks so much for being willing to share this publicly! Nothing is more satisfying than knowing our open source project is helping real companies save tons of money while improving their SEO and traffic (not to mention stability). Instead of forking over hundreds of $$ per month to WP Engine for the upgrade they were pushing you to order, I'm glad SlickStack was able to cut your costs by a huge amount and more than 2x your traffic within a few months after the switch... these are the stories that convince me we are doing something worthwhile. Thanks again, and I hope your traffic keeps growing and growing...
Alternatives Considered:
A ScriptSlickStack that holds your site as Atlas the World on his shoulders!
Comments: This is my minimal yet powerful tool that ensure that my site is online, secure and up to date!
Pros:
It automatizes a lot of the processes while keeping everything up to date, secure and at hand.Gets not in the way which is also a very important aspect for a tool!
Cons:
Shell/Script/Bash knowledge is required and there is a learning curve to itThere is no fancy-glancy interface but this I can note also as a pro ;-)
LittleBizzy Response
2 years ago
Vlad, thank you for taking the time to review SlickStack on Capterra! I'm glad that you have found our free script to be useful with WordPress deployment tasks, while being lightweight and secure. We are hoping more devs like yourself begin realizing the benefits of launching their own (cheaper and better) cloud servers, and move beyond the past decade of shared hosting etc. Thanks again for your comments and encouragement!
Exactly What I Was Looking For
Comments: I've been experimenting and learning SlickStack for almost a year. The last six months I've had two production servers operating. I'm totally happy that going forward, I can keep my servers fast, clean and minimal.
Pros:
Since exploring options to building my own servers on DO, I built dozens of servers using SlickStack trying many configurations. It's simple. Even I can learn. Kind, polite, generous and helpful support is very accessible for a newbie like me. Now I have servers that are fast, clean, minimal and I can rebuild them any time I want!
Cons:
There's a lot to learn, but it's not impossible. Documentation is minimal and a bit scattered. That said, support is a Discord post away.
LittleBizzy Response
3 years ago
Thanks so much for your positive feedback, it is very encouraging to us. Allowing non-expert users to easily setup LEMP stack servers that are "fast, clean, minimal" is exactly our goal, so it's nice to hear directly from users that it is working! Maintaining support and documentation for a free project is admittedly challenging, and we welcome experienced users to get more involved in our chat rooms and to share what they've learned on their blogs and in various discussion forums, to help our community to grow. Please keep the feedback coming and thanks again!
effective software with superb customer service
Pros:
The cooperation between SlickStack and WordPress is excellent. The knowledge base of the customer service staff is superb. Never a miss. Saved me thousands of dollars!
Cons:
I did not experience something that I liked "least" while using Slick Stack
LittleBizzy Response
2 years ago
Dear Sheri, thank you for publicly sharing your experience with SlickStack! We are glad to know our free software has saved you tons of money, while also improving the stability of your WordPress site (and business). We wish your business continued growth and success, and thank you again for your sincerity. If you have any feedback or suggestions about how we might improve SlickStack, or if anything seems confusing, please let us know anytime.
This will be my default method for launching WordPress sites
Comments: It's fantastic. As I have mentioned in the Pros, I'm excited especially by the dev/staging site features and looking forward to future integrations.
Pros:
It's fast, enforces best practices when it comes to performance and security, which in turn forces me to learn these practices. The developer is very active and constantly asks for feedback. They also own a hosting company and develops free WP plugins, which is very important to me. I don't want to adopt a software and to find out it was abandoned and isn't up to date. I also love the options for a "dev" and "staging" website. These are essential to me, and it's great that they come built in. The developer keeps adding features and I was also happy to read that they want to implement backups at the server level. The project also puts emphasis on reducing WordPress bloat. It's fantastic that the team behind it focuses on this, since these days you need to make an effort to reduce WP bloat, which is very painful and *very* time consuming if you're not experience with it. There's a lot of things that are great about SlickStack. I'm looking forward to it growing.
Cons:
As others have said, the documentation should be updated, but this is understandable since the devs are currently focusing on improving the software itself. It's a great opportunity for others to help with the docs, though.
LittleBizzy Response
3 years ago
Thank you very much for this specific feedback, it is very helpful to know that our enforcement of certain best practices is useful to web developers. We have been hoping to receive more feedback about the dev/staging sites feature, so if you have anything to suggest in that regard please do let us know too. You are right that our documentation is horrible and things have been moving at such a fast pace it seemed almost impossible to focus on that for the past few years but hopefully that changes soon and we can make our docs more helpful esp. for new users. Thanks again for taking the time to review SlickStack!
Fast LEMP Stack
Pros:
Been using it for myself and for my clients. Fast LEMP stack. Lots of setup that was preconfigured, which result in fast website.
Cons:
Documentation is still bit minimal. Update is pushed on almost daily basis meaning that yesterday server might have slightly different setup than today server.
LittleBizzy Response
2 years ago
Thanks very much for posting your testimonial here, we are glad that SlickStack has helped save you time while also providing fast performance! You are right that our documentation is poor and outdated and we definitely need to update it, we are also planning to publish some tutorials for specific situations. The constant updates and build versions can be surprising to some users, but our goal there is to keep patches coming all the time in order to avoid sysadmins having to manually update new versions (it also makes maintenance on GitHub much easier for our team). Hopefully with improved messaging and communication we can successfully prove to our users that this approach is worth it, but we welcome any feedback or suggestions you might have anytime. Thanks!
Life Saver
Comments: The best experience possible
Pros:
Flawless service, minimal downtime and fast responses to issues.
Cons:
At times it's difficult when plugins are removed, but they are removed for a reason.
LittleBizzy Response
2 years ago
Trevor, thank you very much for posting your positive experience here with using the managed SlickStack service at LittleBizzy. I'm very glad to hear that you've seen consistent performance and stability of your WooCommerce website! We do understand that the plugin blacklist can be seen as both a frustration and a benefit, and finding the right balance has been challenging for us. We usually disable the blacklist for clients who we setup SlickStack for on their own (non-managed) cloud servers, but keep it active for our LittleBizzy clients due to having many of the same "emergencies" over the years, which lead to the difficult decision to begin disallowing certain problematic plugins. In any case thanks for your patience and feedback on that and please let us know if you have any suggestions going forward. Cheers!
Super Fast & Super Easy to install and configure
Comments:
I really highly recommend everyone checking this stack.
I'm running already 3 sites using this stack, each one of the sites is super fast.
Installation was super easy with their GUI installer.
And all this is running on a $10 per month Amazon Lightsail instance.
Pros:
super easy to use with the installer. You need a very basic level of knowledge using the Ubuntu command line. The highest speed of WordPress installation i have seen so far No need for any cache plugins.
Cons:
Non, Even though it's still in beta and the team is working hard on adding extra features, the stack is fully operational (I'm running a Woocommerce store with over 300K variations a lightning speed)
LittleBizzy Response
3 years ago
Thanks for taking the time to leave a review of SlickStack, we appreciate it. I'm glad that you found the Bash installer easy to understand and use, although we are hoping to improve the setup wizard based on user feedback (e.g. which options users want to customize during setup). I'm also glad that more developers are realizing the power of Nginx FastCGI cache, which vastly simplifies your WordPress configuration while providing extremely scalable caching. Thanks again, and please keep your feedback coming!
SlickStack Hard to Beat
Comments: I am very pleased with SlickStack. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] is a genius. The developer community around SlickStack is very helpful. I highly recommend.
Pros:
SlickStack servers are blazing fast, incredibly secure, and easy to setup. Nothing is taken for granted. Every software component is carefully engineered to deliver maximum performance. It's like a technological street rod with an oversized engine modified for speed.
Cons:
Not every WordPress plugin works on SlickStack. If it's prone to malware, censors content, or denigrates server performance, you can't use it. It's frustrating at times. But having a heavy web page load in less than a second makes it all worthwhile.
LittleBizzy Response
4 years ago
Thanks very much Tim, I'm glad you are so impressed with SlickStack! Our plugin blacklist is a powerful feature that vastly improves security and performance of WordPress websites, however it can be customized (or even disabled) for teams that would rather not use it. We are also planning to implement a "recommended plugins" search tool in the future that should help alleviate some of the frustration when a plugin is added to our blacklist. Thanks again for taking the time to share your feedback with the public, and I hope you continue to be part of our community.
Easy LEMP Stack Setup
Comments: I'm very happy with this stack and will use it with my future websites as well as recommend to friends.
Pros:
Ease and speed of setup is just amazing. Very straightforward even for a beginner.
Cons:
I'd like more advanced settings such as ability to add NewRelic in the ss-config file, enable access logs etc.
LittleBizzy Response
3 years ago
Thank you so much for posting a review of SlickStack here. Our goal is definitely to maintain the fastest WordPress stack around, but we also aim to make it as easy as possible for new users (even those who have never used Linux shell before). So it is nice to know that you found the CLI setup wizard easy enough to understand. Also about your suggestion re: enabling the Nginx access log in ss-config that is a great idea and we will add that immediately. About New Relic we don't have much experience with how that should be integrated, so if possible could you open an Issue on our GitHub repo and provide as much information as possible? Thanks again for your helpful and encouraging feedback!
SlickStack - My New Go-To WordPress Hosting Stack
Comments: SlickStack is easy to configure for intermediate WordPress enthousiasts. The GitHub repository is well maintained, and the [SENSITIVE CONTENT] is very active and happy to provide help @ Discord.
Pros:
Out of the box this hosting stack is full of features for a fully optimized WordPress install. SlickStack let you run a WordPress website on a low resource server, with great performance for speed and security without any additional plugins necessary.
Cons:
First time running the install script there were some errors. This is easily solved by running the install script again.
LittleBizzy Response
2 years ago
Max, thank you for taking the time to publicly share your positive experience with SlickStack, we really appreciate it. I'm glad you have experienced terrific performance on small cloud servers out-of-the-box! You are correct about the ss-install setup process having a few errors and warning messages... the main issues we are still trying to optimize are with Let's Encrypt (Certbot) activation on brand new servers, and the initial population of the WordPress database, however it's true that running ss-install again nearly always resolves these. Hopefully we can improve the remaining hiccups in the coming months so that it doesn't confuse new users. Thanks again and please keep the feedback coming!
Best Server Script Out there!
Comments: My website was very bloated and slow. Switching to SlickStack changed everything and quickly. [SENSITIVE CONTENT] was a pleasure to work with. Honest, helpful, professional, and extremely knowledgeable. He improved my site and reduced my expenses. I am absolutely thrilled to have found SlickStack, I only wish I had found it sooner.
Pros:
It's lighweight scripts and super fast speed have been beyond impressive. There is nothing else like it out there.
Cons:
There is nothing I dislike. There have been no issues since I began using SlickStack.
LittleBizzy Response
3 years ago
Thanks so much for leaving this review from the perspective of a website owner who was struggling with performance issues on a poorly configured AWS server. We see this situation often, where business owners have been convinced to use the Amazon cloud, but are left on their own to manage the rather complicated interface, and the server is not even properly configured for WordPress loading speed or security. I'm glad that moving to a cheaper (optimized) SlickStack server on a different KVM cloud provider resulted in much faster performance for you and a much cheaper bill each month. Best wishes for now!
Strong Performance Results
Comments: It's been in use now for around three months and the positive impact it has had on website speed is already paying dividends. It is easy to use but even if it were somewhat difficult the performance gains would still outweigh the difficulty.
Pros:
The ease of use is stellar and the impact on site performance is optimal. It was also quick to get up and running.
Cons:
At the moment, I cannot think of other needs from the software. I'm sure there could be but not at the moment.
LittleBizzy Response
2 years ago
Thanks so much for sharing your experience here, Rafael. I'm glad that you have seen such noticeable improvements to your site in terms of performance and SEO rankings! This is another great example of why I believe so strongly that regional cloud servers running e.g. SlickStack, and following best practices, is the future of local SEO. Small businesses don't have time to worry about building spammy backlink profiles, nor should they have to... technical SEO, mild social media activity and reviews, and general company reputation and transparency are a healthier approach, and really just make more sense.
Assistance Where Needed
Comments: We used SlickStack as part of the larger optimization around the app prior to launch and bringing in outside users.
Pros:
This review is more on the professional that engaged Slickstack toward our benefit. I found [SENSITIVE CONTENT] while looking for assistance on our website, email, and larger setup. I came in not really knowing everything that was being engaged but the end results simply speak for themselves with the new functionality better in every way!
Cons:
I wasn't involved to the point where I can point out the weaknesses of the process.
LittleBizzy Response
3 years ago
Hey Mike, thanks so much for being so encouraging and appreciative. I know many companies are caught between being big enough for these decisions to have a long-term impact, but small enough where they don't have full-time IT professionals per se... so when a case comes like yours where SlickStack is able to bridge that gap (very affordably) and provide noticeable value in performance and security, it makes me happy to witness that!
Makes launching LEMP a breeze
Comments: A cheat code for launching pre-configured LEMP servers!
Pros:
Simplifies all the things I hate about setting up and launching a LEMP server. SlickStack makes the entire process painless and simple.
Cons:
I think documentation could be updated more often, but that's kind of a normal issue with software that is changing all the time.
LittleBizzy Response
4 years ago
Thank you for your kind words, we're glad that you've found the software extremely useful for setting up LEMP stack servers! And you're right about our documentation being very sparse and outdated; it's one of the more common questions that we receive. Although SlickStack is a free and open source project with a small team, we are planning to expand the docs eventually. We're also hoping that some tech-savvy bloggers might step up and help get the word out about how to use SlickStack. Please keep the feedback coming anytime in our community chat rooms, thanks!
