Last updated on 4th March 2026

Deploying to Hostwinds via DeployHQ: Automated Server Deployment

Deploying to your site hosted with Hostwinds is very simple with DeployHQ. Hostwinds offers VPS, cloud servers, and dedicated servers with full SSH access.

Firstly, you'll need to set up your DeployHQ project, then connect to your Hostwinds server.

Note: Hostwinds shared and business hosting plans do not support SSH or SFTP — only FTP on port 21. For SFTP/SSH deployment with DeployHQ, you'll need a VPS, cloud server, or dedicated server.

Setting up your project

Head to the Projects screen in DeployHQ, then click the New Project button to get started.

You'll be prompted to enter a name for your project, then select where your repository is hosted.

New Project

Next, click Create project and you'll be taken to a screen where you can log in with your repository hosting account to authorise access and then choose your repository.

Setting up Hostwinds

Once you've configured your repository, you'll need to connect to your Hostwinds server.

Finding your credentials

  1. Log in to the Hostwinds Client Area
  2. Navigate to Cloud Control > Cloud Portal from the top menu
  3. Your server's IP address is shown in the server overview table
  4. The root password can be viewed and changed in the server dashboard's Overview section

The default SSH user is root on all Linux VPS and dedicated servers, and the port is 22.

Adding the server in DeployHQ

Head to Servers & Groups, and click the New Server button at the top of the screen. If you've just added your repository, you will have been taken to this page automatically.

Start by entering a name, and choosing SSH/SFTP as the protocol. Enter your server's IP address as the hostname, root as the username, your password, and leave the port blank to use the default (22).

For the deployment path, enter the directory where your files should be uploaded:

  • With cPanel (managed VPS): /home/USERNAME/public_html
  • Without cPanel: /var/www/html/ (Apache/Nginx default) or your custom web root

Within Deployment options, you can choose to automatically deploy your server and, if you're only deploying files from a certain directory in your repository, enter a Deployment subdirectory.

Note: Hostwinds runs a Cloud Agent (HWAgent) on all VPS servers that manages passwords and SSH keys on boot. If you change your root password via SSH but not via the Cloud Portal, the agent may overwrite it on the next reboot. Always change passwords through the Cloud Portal.

Click Create Server to finish, then you can proceed to start your first deployment.

Run your first deployment

By default, DeployHQ will upload the whole repository to your server on the first deployment, because there is no previously deployed commit to compare to.

If your files are already on Hostwinds and up to date with the latest commit, you can follow this guide to skip that first deployment:

Otherwise, just follow this guide to start your first deployment, then after the first deployment, only files that have changed will be uploaded in future.

That's it! You've now set up and run your first deployment to your Hostwinds server and your future changes will be uploaded for you automatically, or at the simple click of a button.

Further reading

DeployHQ has a number of very useful features to help with your deployments in general that you might wish to find out more about:

  • Compiling assets and javascript with the Build pipeline
  • Running commands on your server with SSH commands
  • Stop certain files from being uploaded in deployments using Excluded files
  • Keep important files safely away from your repository using Config files
  • Keep your team in the loop and run other useful tasks during a deployment with our Integrations