FAQ about Stackhero for GitLab Runner cloud

Your runner is compatible with GitLab.com (Free, Premium, and Ultimate) as well as any self-managed GitLab, including a GitLab instance you host on Stackhero. You only need to register it once with an authentication token. It will then start processing your jobs.

No. Unlike runners that are billed per minute, your GitLab Runner runs on dedicated, isolated infrastructure, so your build minutes are unlimited. You can run pipelines 24/7 without ever needing to top up credits.

It depends on your plan, which can support a single job or up to several dozen concurrent jobs. This matches the GitLab Runner concurrent setting. The more concurrent jobs you have, the more your pipeline runs in parallel instead of being queued.

The Docker executor. Each job runs in its own isolated container, created from the image you specify in your .gitlab-ci.yml, making your builds reproducible and independent from one another.

Yes. Docker-in-Docker support lets you run docker build and push images to any registry, including the GitLab Container Registry. See the GitLab Runner documentation for a ready-to-use example.

Create an authentication token in your GitLab project, group, or instance, then paste it into the Stackhero dashboard. Your runner will connect automatically. The full walkthrough is available in the GitLab Runner documentation.

No, and that is exactly the value Stackhero brings. There are no servers for you to manage: Stackhero takes care of the operating system, security patches, service configuration, TLS certificates, firewall, monitoring, and daily atomic backups.
Everything you would normally do over SSH is available as a supervised action in your dashboard, with just one click: change the configuration, upgrade to a new version, resize the instance, open or close a port, or restore a backup.
You retain full access to the service itself, its admin console, APIs, and your data. Nothing related to your application is out of your reach.
This also reduces your attack surface: there are no SSH keys to rotate, leak, or brute-force.
If there is an option missing in the dashboard, let us know. That’s how the configuration page evolves on the platform.

No. That is exactly what Stackhero is for: you get a production-ready GitLab Runner without having to hire anyone to manage it.

No provisioning steps. No operating system to update. No backup script to write or test. No monitoring stack to set up. No on-call duty to cover.

Your team can focus on what makes your product unique, and the infrastructure tasks that used to take weeks just disappear.

Absolutely! Your instance has its own firewall where you can decide which IPs have access to which port in just 2 clicks.

Premium support is included in every plan at no additional cost. There are no support tiers to purchase and no priority support fees.
Support is available by email and online chat during business hours, 9am to 6pm Central European Time, with a typical first response within one hour.

Outside of these hours, your services are monitored 24/7.
If downtime is detected, automated remediation is triggered immediately, and an on-call engineer is notified if the issue is not resolved.
You do not need to detect the incident yourself, and you do not need to maintain your own on-call rotation.

Everything is included. The price you see on the pricing page is the total you pay: the service itself, the dedicated and isolated infrastructure it runs on, unlimited and unmetered network traffic, daily atomic backups and their storage, free and unlimited backup restores, updates and version upgrades, TLS certificates, your custom domain, firewall, monitoring, and premium support.
There are no setup fees, no per-user or per-seat charges, no support add-ons, no traffic bills, and no fees for restoring a backup.

At the start of each month, our system calculates how many hours your services were running and generates a detailed invoice.
You receive a single monthly invoice that includes all your services, presented clearly and easy to understand. Your accounting team will appreciate that!
There is no commitment: you can stop billing for a service with a single click, and you are only charged for the hours it was active.

You choose where your servers are located: in the European Union or in the USA.

You select the region when you order, and your data stays there.

Your service runs on dedicated and isolated infrastructure: an instance reserved just for you, not a container shared with other customers on a common host. Connections are secured with TLS 1.3, and your instance has its own firewall, so you control which IPs can access each port.

Stackhero is ISO 27001 certified, audited annually by an independent organization, and provides a GDPR-compliant Data Processing Agreement with every plan.

Your data is automatically backed up at least once a day for every service and every plan. Additional backups are also performed automatically during sensitive operations such as updates or upgrades.
Retention: one backup per day is kept for 7 days, one per week for 1 month, and one per month for 3 months.
Each backup is stored in a vault located at least 200 km from the datacentre hosting your service, so a physical incident cannot affect both sites at the same time.
You can restore your backups at any time, as often as needed, with a single click. There are no restoration fees and no limits on the number of restores.

The issue with traditional backup systems is that files are saved at different time intervals.
Let's say you have 2 files, a.txt and b.txt. Your backup starts at 9 a.m. and finishes at 10 a.m.
The file a.txt will contain data from 9 a.m. and b.txt will contain data from 10 a.m.
This is common in backup systems and leads to significant consistency issues.

This is why we developed an in-house backup system that captures an atomic image of your instance at a precise moment.
Atomic in the sense that we can guarantee all files in the backup are captured at exactly the same time.
If your backup starts at 9 a.m., all files will have data from 9 a.m. You have a perfectly consistent and reliable backup.

Backups are initially sent to a dedicated server, which verifies and validates the data. Once these checks are approved, the backups are encrypted and archived.
Encryption uses ECDH and Curve25519 as part of the OpenPGP protocol, with a unique key generated for each backup.

Your service consists of several subservices, each running in containers within an environment dedicated entirely to you.
This environment is private and isolated from other customers, ensuring strong security and optimal performance.
Everything is hosted on a bare-metal server running Stackhero DC OS, our own Linux distribution, with disks physically attached to your instance to provide maximum IOPS.

This isolation is guaranteed by a dedicated virtual machine for each customer, not by shared containers on a multi-tenant host.

We use disks that are physically connected to your instances.
We don't use network disks, unlike traditional cloud solutions, which are slow and costly.
This way, we ensure optimal performance and exceptional IOPS.

We developed our own cloud software solution, making us entirely independent from cloud providers. We deploy this innovative solution directly on bare-metal servers, offering you exceptional performance and stability.

Stackhero's parent company was founded in 2009.
The platform itself launched in 2018, after two years of development, and has been running production workloads ever since.

The company is profitable and independent: no outside investors, and no exit strategy to plan for.
That stability is important when you choose a provider for a service you can't just move in an afternoon.

Both use the same platform. A startup can launch its first GitLab Runner in production in two minutes on the smallest plan, then scale up to dozens of vCPUs as the product grows, without changing providers or migrating anything.
Larger organizations get the features they need (included for all companies on all plans): ISO 27001 certification, a GDPR-compliant Data Processing Agreement, a contractual 99.9% SLA, dedicated and isolated infrastructure, and a single monthly invoice that's easy for accounting to process.
In both cases, you only need to adjust the size of the instance.

Stackhero's primary mission is to provide a platform that is easy to use, extremely reliable, and highly secure.
A key element in achieving this mission is the annual attainment of the ISO 27001 certification, a globally recognized quality and security label.
This certification, awarded following a rigorous audit conducted by an independent external body, attests to compliance with the strictest international standards in information security.