Admin guide

Hubzilla is more than a simple web application. It is a complex communications system which more closely resembles an email server than a web server. For reliability and performance, messages are delivered in the background and are queued for later delivery when sites are down. This kind of functionality requires a bit more of the host system than the typical blog. Not every PHP/MySQL hosting provider will be able to support Hubzilla. Many will but please review the requirements and confirm these with your hosting provider prior to installation.

We've tried very hard to ensure that Hubzilla will run on commodity hosting platforms such as those used to host Wordpress blogs and Drupal websites. It will run on most any Linux VPS system. Windows LAMP platforms such as XAMPP and WAMP are not officially supported at this time however we welcome patches if you manage to get it working.

Please consider reading following chapters in the Admin guide before installing Hubzilla:

• Where to find more help
• Before you begin
• Deployment
• Requirements
• Manual installation
• Automated installation via the .homeinstall shell script
• Service Classes (How to set limits on system resources)
• Theme management
• Channel directory (How to hide the tag cloud on the channel directory page; how to implement the off-grid / non federated mode)
• Database
• Hidden configs

You might consider using following ready-to-use solutions:

• knthost.com/hubzilla. Several customers confirmed good support.
• Softacolous. Check if you can install the addons though. Avaliable on (selection is not verified and not exhaustive):
  • Novatrend.ch
  • Serverprofis.de
  • Kualo.com
  • Hostgator.com
  • Glowhost.com
  • A2ahosting.in
  • Interserver.net
  • Global-village.de
• Yunohost. You cannot install Hubzilla into the root directory though, but only into a subdomain. Check if you can install addons.

The chapter Federation Addons in the Admin guide is outdated:

• The addon for the oStatus (GNU-Social) protocol is not supported anymore.
• The addon for the ActivityPub protocol on the other hand is fully implemented and available. It's called pubcrawl.

You should offer on the site info page both a link to the channel of the admin and a way of getting into contact with the admin by other means, e.g. a clone on another hub and/or something outside Hubzilla. If the users of your hub write down this info somewhere outside Hubzilla, they can contact you even when your hub is temporarily unavailable. In order to do so, enter that info under /admin/site/ in the field "Administrator information".

Activating logging under /admin/logs helps you to locate reasons for bugs or misconfigurations. Additionally, if you run on a shared host, with logging activated you learn about the routines of your server provider.

Additionally, please consider reading following chapters in the admin guide:

• Administration
• Troubleshooting

As administrator you do not have access to users' login data, but you can block or delete users and channels at any time. End-to-end-encryption of individual posts is possible in Hubzilla. Such posts cannot be viewed by the administrator.

Use the hubzilla.org/channel/adminsforum to discuss your experiences and problems with other Hubzilla admins.