CMS Made Simple
Hosting
Install CMS Made Simple in one click on our fast, reliable UK web hosting. Fully managed with free SSL, daily backups, and dedicated expert support.
What is CMS Made Simple?
CMS Made Simple is an open-source PHP content management system first released in 2004 with a deliberate focus on small to medium business websites. It is licensed under the GPL and maintained by a long-standing volunteer community. The platform aims to give editors a friendly admin without forcing developers into a heavy framework.
Technical details: PHP 7.4+ supported (PHP 8.1+ tested in current releases), MySQL or MariaDB, Smarty templating engine for templates, and a module-based extension model. The admin UI was overhauled in version 2 and the project has continued shipping point releases through 2024 and 2025. There is a small but active marketplace of community modules covering forms, news, image galleries, and similar editorial features.
CMS Made Simple has carved out a niche with small business owners and developers who want something less complex than Drupal but more developer-flexible than WordPress. It is included in the 365i one-click installer alongside the rest of the supported applications.
365i’s editorial review of CMS Made Simple
CMS Made Simple is honest in its name. It really is meant to be simple: a small business website, half a dozen pages, a news section, a contact form, an admin a non-technical owner can drive without a four-week training course. For exactly that use case it does the job better than WordPress, which has grown enough complexity around blocks, plug-ins, and themes that "simple business website" is no longer WordPress's strongest suit.
I've hosted CMS Made Simple sites for a few small business owners over the years, and the pattern is always the same: an owner who values being able to edit their own pages without breaking the site, doesn't want to maintain a plug-in stack, and is happy with HTML editing for slightly more complex content. The Smarty templating means a developer can build them a clean theme once and then leave it alone. There's no "block editor that updates monthly and changes how everything works."
What works well: the install is fast, the admin is logical, and the Smarty templating is approachable for anyone who has worked with HTML and PHP. Module updates are infrequent and rarely break things. The community is small but responsive on the official forum. The application core is conservative about adding features, which I appreciate: most small businesses don't need every new shiny thing, they need their site to keep working.
"CMS Made Simple is the right answer for a small business owner who wants to edit their own pages and never think about CMS updates again. WordPress has outgrown that brief. CMS Made Simple still fits it."
Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting
What's annoying: theme choice is small compared to WordPress. The community module marketplace is small. If you want a complex e-commerce setup, CMS Made Simple is not the platform, you'd put a separate cart on a subdomain or pick WooCommerce. The admin doesn't have a true block editor, content is HTML-based with a TinyMCE-style WYSIWYG. Some owners love that, others miss the visual flexibility WordPress now offers.
Hosting-wise, CMS Made Simple is light on resources. Our shared hosting from £5.99/mo handles it without breathing hard. PHP memory at 128MB is enough for typical use. MySQL 8 covers the schema. Cron is supported, used for the search index rebuild and for some news modules. We back up daily and keep 30 days of restore points. We've never seen a CMS Made Simple site exhaust unlimited LVE resources unless something else was running on the same account.
If you're a small business owner thinking about a website rebuild and you want something genuinely simple to keep on top of, CMS Made Simple is worth a look alongside WordPress. The decision usually comes down to: do you want a block editor and a huge plug-in marketplace (WordPress), or do you want a calmer admin and a developer-built theme that you don't have to maintain (CMS Made Simple). Both are legitimate answers, the trick is being honest about which one fits your working style.
Why Host CMS Made Simple with 365i?
Our web hosting is built for PHP applications like CMS Made Simple. Every plan includes everything you need to launch and grow.
One-Click Installation
Install CMS Made Simple with a single click from your control panel. No manual configuration, no FTP uploads, no database setup.
Free SSL Certificate
Every site gets a free SSL certificate, automatically configured and renewed. Keep your CMS Made Simple installation secure from day one.
99.9% Uptime Guarantee
Enterprise-grade data centres in the UK, US & Asia with redundant power, cooling, and network connectivity. Backed by our uptime SLA.
Daily Backups
Automatic daily backups with easy one-click restore. Your CMS Made Simple data is always safe and recoverable.
7-Day Expert Support
UK-based hosting specialists available 7 days a week including evenings, weekends, and bank holidays. Real people, real help.
SSD Storage
All plans run on fast SSD storage for snappy page loads and responsive admin panels. CMS Made Simple performs at its best.
Where CMS Made Simple Fits
Best for
Small business owners who want an editor-friendly admin without WordPress's plug-in maintenance overhead. Sites with mostly editorial content (services, about, contact, news) where the developer builds a clean theme once and the owner edits text and images themselves. Local businesses, professional services firms, small charities.
Watch for
Theme choice is much smaller than WordPress. Community module marketplace is small. No native e-commerce, you'd use a separate platform if you need a shop. The WYSIWYG admin doesn't offer the block-style flexibility WordPress has gained, which some owners find limiting after seeing modern WordPress sites.
Web Hosting for CMS Made Simple
Get CMS Made Simple up and running in minutes with our fast, reliable web hosting. Every plan includes one-click installation, free SSL, UK, US & Asia data centres, and dedicated expert support.
- 1 website
- 10 GB SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- 5 websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- CDN included
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- 10 websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- CDN included
- Timeline Backup/Restore
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- Priority support
All prices exclude VAT. No contract, cancel any time.
Need More Power for CMS Made Simple?
For high-traffic sites, large catalogues, or mission-critical deployments, our fully managed cloud servers give CMS Made Simple dedicated resources and enterprise-grade performance.
- Dedicated CPU, RAM & SSD storage
- 99.99% uptime SLA
- Fully managed by our team
- Choose 365i, AWS, or Google Cloud
Servers
Servers
Servers
A CMS Made Simple case from our books
A professional services firm in the South East joined us in late 2024 with a CMS Made Simple site they\'d run since around 2014. The site had 28 pages of editorial content, a news section, and a contact form. The firm processes around 12,000 visits a month. They were paying around £19/mo on a shared host with patchy UK latency and had been considering a rebuild on WordPress.
We did a hosting consultation rather than a rebuild. The CMS Made Simple install was working fine, the owner was confident editing pages, and the news module ticked all their boxes. A WordPress rebuild would have meant £4,000-£6,000 of design and development work plus an ongoing plug-in maintenance burden the firm had no appetite for. We migrated their CMS Made Simple install to our shared hosting at £5.99/mo, ran the official upgrade to the current release, retested every page, and configured the CDN with pre-caching on their service pages.
The migration took around six working hours. UK page-load times improved by roughly 51%. The firm saved around £14/mo in hosting and avoided the rebuild cost entirely.
What we would tell anyone in the same spot: don\'t replatform a CMS that already works for the owner. Improve the hosting, keep the CMS, and revisit the rebuild question only if the current platform stops meeting needs.
Anonymised at the client's request. Industry, scale, and timeline preserved.
What we look for in cms hosting
A content management system is a long-term tenant on your hosting, not a quick install. We tune for what CMSs actually do day to day: an opcache configured to survive plugin and theme upgrades, PHP memory at 256MB or higher because page builders chew through it, daily backups that include the uploads directory and not just the database, and free SSL enforced from day one. We also keep an honest opinion about which CMS suits which site and will tell you when something would run better elsewhere.
CMS Made Simple Hosting FAQ
Common questions we hear from people running CMS Made Simple on our hosting.
CMS Made Simple runs on PHP 7.4+ (PHP 8.1+ tested in current releases) and MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB. Our shared hosting includes PHP 8.3 default, MySQL 8, 256MB PHP memory, and cron access, all of which exceed CMS Made Simple's minimums. The application uses Smarty templating, which is included in the application bundle. No special server-side modules are needed beyond standard LAMP plus the PHP GD or Imagick extension for image uploads, both included on our hosting.
Yes. CMS Made Simple is in our application installer. The installer creates the database, drops the files, and walks you through the wizard which sets site name, admin login, and basic configuration. Total install time is around 6 minutes. After install, the developer's job is to install a theme (community-built or built from scratch) and define page templates. The owner can typically start editing pages within an hour of install if a basic theme is in place.
For typical small to medium business sites under 30,000 visits a month, our shared hosting at £5.99/mo handles CMS Made Simple comfortably. The application caches rendered pages by default, which keeps PHP load low. For larger editorial sites or those with high traffic spikes, our managed cloud servers from £9.99/mo with OPcache and dedicated database resources give noticeably better headroom. CMS Made Simple itself can handle several thousand pages without architectural strain.
Hosting-layer support 7 days a week including evenings, weekends, and bank holidays. PHP, MySQL, cron, file permissions, SSL, email, DNS, backups, migrations, and CDN. We don't build CMS Made Simple themes or write Smarty templates as part of standard support, that's development work and we can refer to our sister site 365iwebdesign.co.uk. The CMS Made Simple community forum is the right place for application-specific questions. Datacentre infrastructure is monitored 24/7.
Yes, free with our migration service. Send us your existing host's FTP and database details. We'll move the install, run the official upgrade to the current release if your version is older, retest every page, set up SSL, and cut DNS once you're happy. Most CMS Made Simple migrations take us 2 to 4 working hours. If your install is heavily customised or running an older version (1.x), we may suggest a careful staged upgrade rather than a single-step move.
CMS Made Simple has a clean security record relative to its size. Keep core updated as point releases ship, and audit any community modules before installing them. Our hosting adds free SSL, daily backups, file permission hardening, platform-level WAF rules, and OPcache. For business-critical sites, we'd suggest two-factor authentication on admin (available as a community module) and IP-restricting the admin URL where practical. The Smarty templating engine is sandboxed enough that template-injection risks are low when templates are written by developers rather than user-uploaded.
Ready to Host CMS Made Simple?
Get started with CMS Made Simple on our fast UK web hosting. One-click installation, free SSL, and dedicated expert support included.