Winter CMS
Hosting
Install Winter CMS in one click on our fast, reliable UK web hosting. Fully managed with free SSL, daily backups, and dedicated expert support.
What is Winter CMS?
Winter CMS is a modern, file-based content management system built on the Laravel PHP framework. It was forked from October CMS in 2021 by a group of October's most active community contributors who wanted to keep the platform fully free and open-source after October moved to a commercial model.
Where WordPress's developer experience is shaped by 20 years of legacy decisions, Winter is built on contemporary PHP foundations: Composer dependency management, Twig templating, Laravel's service container and routing, and a plugin architecture where plugins are proper PHP packages rather than loose folders of files. Themes are file-based (HTML/Twig in version control) rather than database-driven.
For developer-led builds, particularly agency work and bespoke client sites, Winter is one of the most credible PHP CMS choices in 2026. It runs cleanly on PHP 8.5, supports MySQL and PostgreSQL, and works on standard shared hosting as well as cloud servers. Resource usage is moderate; busy sites benefit from a cloud server, but a typical client site runs comfortably on a £5.99 shared plan.
365i’s editorial review of Winter CMS
Winter CMS is the platform I'd reach for when a client wants something more structured than WordPress, has a developer (or an agency) involved, and isn't tied to a specific WordPress plugin. It treats content as code in a way WordPress fundamentally doesn't, which has consequences for both build quality and maintenance.
The October CMS to Winter CMS story matters because it tells you something about the community. October was a developer-favourite CMS for years. When it moved to a commercial model, the contributors who'd been doing the unpaid work forked it, kept it free, and have shipped consistent updates ever since. That's not just open-source nostalgia, it's a sign the project is community-led rather than vendor-led.
"WordPress is brilliant when you're shipping a site with established plugins and don't have a developer on the team. Winter is brilliant when you do have a developer and you want them building features rather than fighting the platform. Different jobs, different tools, and that's fine. The mistake is using the wrong one for the job and blaming the tool when it groans."
Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting
From a hosting perspective Winter is well-behaved. PHP 8.5 is supported and recommended. The Laravel underpinnings mean Composer is involved, so you'll want SSH access during build (which we provide on every plan from shared upward). The plugin system uses migrations for database changes, which means deployments are scriptable rather than click-through; this is a developer-friendly trait that pays off in agency workflows where you want staging-to-production parity.
One thing to know about Winter is that it leans on caching for production performance. The default route, view, and config caches need to be enabled and warmed in production. We've seen Winter sites that look slow on shared hosting purely because the developer skipped the production cache step. Once configured, performance is comparable to a well-tuned WordPress with a caching plugin, often better because there are fewer plugin layers between the request and the response.
The plugin and theme marketplaces are smaller than WordPress's. That's a feature, not a bug, for agency builds where you'd be writing custom code anyway. For DIY users who expect to install ten plugins and have a complete site, Winter is the wrong choice; that's a WordPress workflow.
One-click install, PHP 8.5, MySQL 8, free SSL, daily backups, SSH access for Composer, 7-day expert support. £5.99 a month shared or £9.99 cloud, free migration if you\'re moving an existing Winter or October install.
Why Host Winter CMS with 365i?
Our web hosting is built for PHP applications like Winter CMS. Every plan includes everything you need to launch and grow.
One-Click Installation
Install Winter CMS 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 Winter CMS installation secure from day one.
99.9%+ Uptime Track Record
Enterprise-grade data centres in the UK, US & Asia with redundant power, cooling, and network connectivity. Shared hosting runs on autoscaling cloud infrastructure with a 99.9%+ historical uptime record; Managed Cloud Servers target 99.99% uptime; our VPS products carry a contractual 99.99% network availability SLA with service credits.
Daily Backups
Automatic daily backups with easy one-click restore. Your Winter CMS 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. Winter CMS performs at its best.
Where Winter CMS Fits
Best for
Agencies and freelance developers building bespoke client sites. Multi-environment workflows where staging-to-production parity matters. Sites that need clean URLs, custom content models, and structured templating without WordPress's legacy quirks. Particularly good when the developer values version control of templates and migration-based database changes over click-through admin configuration.
Watch for
Smaller plugin marketplace than WordPress; expect to write custom code for non-trivial features. Themes are not point-and-click swaps; they're part of the codebase. The learning curve is real for developers used to WordPress. Production performance depends on enabling Laravel's caches; skip this and the site feels slow. Documentation has improved but still has gaps in places. Hosting needs SSH for Composer; we include that on all plans.
Web Hosting for Winter CMS
Get Winter CMS 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
-
Timeline Backup/Restore
Timeline Backup
- Website files and databases
- Daily snapshots, 30-day retention
- One-click file and database restore
- Everything above, plus email mailbox backups
- 60-day database retention
- Mailbox restore (to a temporary mailbox first, then sync back)
- 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 (Pro)
Timeline Backup
- Website files and databases
- Daily snapshots, 30-day retention
- One-click file and database restore
- Everything above, plus email mailbox backups
- 60-day database retention
- Mailbox restore (to a temporary mailbox first, then sync back)
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
All prices exclude VAT. No contract, cancel any time.
Need More Power for Winter CMS?
For high-traffic sites, large catalogues, or mission-critical deployments, our fully managed cloud servers give Winter CMS dedicated resources and enterprise-grade performance.
- Dedicated CPU, RAM & SSD storage
- 99.99% uptime
- Fully managed by our team
- Choose 365i, AWS, or Google Cloud
Servers
Servers
Servers
A Winter CMS case from our books
A small digital agency in Bristol moved one of their longstanding clients from a heavily customised WordPress install to Winter CMS in mid-2025. The client was a niche professional services firm with around 200 pages of content, a custom team-and-services model, and a publication archive. The WordPress site had accreted 38 plugins over a decade, and minor changes were taking the agency hours of regression testing.
We hosted the new Winter build on a £9.99 cloud server. The agency rebuilt the content model in Winter\'s native CMS pages and components, migrated content through a custom import script (about three days of developer time), and went live after two weeks of build plus a week of UAT. Page-load times dropped from a Lighthouse mobile score of 47 on the old WordPress site to 91 on the new Winter site, mostly because the plugin layer was gone.
Six months in, the agency has shipped four more changes to the same site through their normal git/CI workflow, none of which would have been viable on the WordPress install. Their internal time per change dropped from around 6 hours to under 2.
What we would tell anyone in the same spot: don\'t replatform WordPress sites for the sake of it. Replatform when the plugin debt is causing real cost.
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.
More applications you can install on 365i hosting
Beyond CMS, our one-click installer covers 79 open-source PHP applications across 27 categories. A small selection from across the catalogue:
Winter CMS Hosting FAQ
Common questions we hear from people running Winter CMS on our hosting.
Different tools for different jobs. WordPress wins when a site is plugin-driven, content-heavy, and managed by non-developers. Winter wins when a developer is involved, the build is bespoke, and version control of templates matters. Winter's codebase is cleaner and based on modern Laravel; WordPress's codebase is older but has a vastly larger ecosystem. Pick based on team and use case, not which is "better".
Yes. Since the fork from October CMS in 2021, Winter has shipped consistent releases roughly every couple of months, kept up with PHP and Laravel version requirements, and the maintainer team has grown. The project is community-led with no commercial lock-in, which is one of the reasons agencies who got burned by October's commercial pivot moved to Winter and stayed.
Yes, the migration path is documented and well-trodden because that's how Winter started. Most October sites can be moved to Winter by swapping the core packages and running the upgrade migrations. Plugin compatibility is generally good for community plugins; commercial October plugins won't work on Winter without licensing changes. We've done several of these migrations and we'll handle yours as part of free migration.
Yes, for any non-trivial setup. Winter uses Composer for dependency management, plugins are installed via Composer or via the marketplace using Composer underneath, and updates are run via Artisan commands (Laravel's CLI tool). SSH access is included on all 365i plans from £5.99 upward. There's a basic admin install path that doesn't require SSH, but for production work you'll want it.
Smaller than WordPress, deliberately. The official marketplace has hundreds of plugins covering common needs (forms, blog/news, ecommerce, multi-language, SEO). Themes are typically purchased or built from scratch as part of an agency engagement. If you're comparing to WordPress's 60,000+ plugins, Winter looks small. If you're comparing to "what does a developer actually need to build a bespoke site", the marketplace usually has the building blocks.
Ready to Host Winter CMS?
Get started with Winter CMS on our fast UK web hosting. One-click installation, free SSL, and dedicated expert support included.