Marketing Automation on $5/Month with Mautic and GoDaddy

I recently published a series on transitioning from an email service provider to the Mautic marketing automation platform. However, Mautic’s “pro” version of its software has jumped in price from a reasonable 12/month to500/month, putting it completely out of my price range for a solo entrepreneur (which is what my book/webinar business is).

What do we do when faced with a situation like this? The good news is that Mautic’s underlying code is open source software. That means as long as you have the basic skills necessary to operate the infrastructure, you can just install it on your own server. Five years ago, that was a profession unto itself, but today, with cloud servers and application containers, “running your own server” is about as difficult as running a blog.

Here’s how to transition from Mautic Pro to your own installation of Mautic. First, create a free account over at Bitnami.

Next, find Mautic in the Applications listing.

Choose Launch in the Cloud, and then click Need help deciding?

Choose the service provider you’re most comfortable with. I chose GoDaddy because they’re a client of mine and because so many of my domains are already hosted there, I could just add a cloud server to my account.

On GoDaddy’s Cloud Servers, choose Create New Server. Fill in the requisite information.

Scroll down and choose Bitnami Apps, then choose All Apps:

Choose Mautic and click Install.

When it comes to a server type to install, Mautic will run fine in a GoDaddy Tiny Cloud Server, the $5/month option. If you expect a heavy server load due to being a very popular website, choose a Medium install. You’ll have 2 CPUs and plenty of disk space just to run Mautic.

Optionally, you may want to assign a domain name to your Mautic instance for ease of use. I had a few dormant domains on my account, so I picked one.

Now we’re up and running. Just log into the Mautic instance and follow the directions in my previous tutorials for configuring Mautic:

Marketing Automation Migration Series

• Part 1: Introduction and why I’m changing systems
• Part 2: Inventory and backup existing systems
• Part 3: Setting up Amazon SES
• Part 4: Migrating lists and forms
• Part 5: Tagging and tracking
• Part 6: Templates and triggers
• Part 7: Testing and debugging
• Part 8: Migration

If you’ve already done a Mautic install on your own machine, you’ll need to create a SQL dump file of your old Mautic database, then import it into the new database. There’s no simple one-click option for now. If you’re using Mautic’s existing pro service, bad news: you and I will need to recreate our Mautic install from scratch.

Remember to change your tracking pixels in your tag management software; once you transition over, you’ll be in a different account entirely.

That’s how we transition from a service that’s about to be 500/month to5/month. It’s not painless or instant, but it’s definitely the way to go for anyone who doesn’t want a massive price increase.

Disclosure: GoDaddy is a client of mine through my employer, SHIFT Communications. While I was not solicited to write this post, I do receive indirect financial benefit through my compensation.

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