OJS hosting guide

Choosing OJS hosting is one of the highest-leverage decisions for an academic journal. Open Journal Systems is free software — but uptime, email delivery, backups, PHP versions, and TLS still determine whether authors and reviewers can trust your site.

This guide explains what production OJS hosting needs, how managed hosting differs from a generic VPS, and when to migrate.

What OJS hosting must include

• Compatible PHP and MySQL/MariaDB for your OJS version (OJS 3.4 typically needs PHP 8.1+)
• HTTPS with automatic certificate renewal
• A private files directory outside the public web root
• Authenticated SMTP so review invitations and password resets deliver (SPF/DKIM aligned)
• Automated backups of the database and files directory, with restore tests
• Monitoring for downtime and disk growth from PDF galleys and submission files

Shared hosting vs VPS vs managed OJS hosting

• Cheap shared hosting — often fails on PHP extensions, mail reputation, or file permissions
• Self-managed VPS — flexible, but your team owns upgrades, security patches, and restores
• Managed OJS hosting — infrastructure tuned for journals, with backups and upgrade help included

If your editorial board should not also be a sysadmin team, managed hosting is usually cheaper than outages during peer review.

Signs you need to migrate OJS hosting

• Reviewers never receive invitation emails
• The site is slow when issues with large PDFs are published
• You cannot upgrade OJS safely because the host is stuck on old PHP
• There is no tested backup of the files directory
• URLs or DOIs break after a previous move

Zero-downtime OJS migration checklist

1. Inventory journals, custom plugins, themes, and DNS
2. Stage a full copy (database + files) on the new host
3. Verify SMTP, HTTPS, and submission uploads on staging
4. Plan DNS cutover and freeze writes briefly if needed
5. Confirm DOI landing pages and old URLs still resolve

See also the OJS installation guide, backup guide, and our managed hosting & migration service.