FAQ about Stackhero for GitLab Runner cloud

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

No. Unlike runners charged per minute, your GitLab Runner operates on dedicated, isolated infrastructure, giving you unlimited build minutes. You can run pipelines continuously, 24/7, without ever needing to top up credits.

This depends on your plan, which may support a single job or up to dozens of simultaneous jobs. This relates to the concurrent setting in GitLab Runner. The more concurrent jobs you have, the more your pipeline runs in parallel rather than being queued.

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

Yes. Docker-in-Docker support enables you to run docker build and push images to any registry, including the GitLab Container Registry. Please refer to 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 offers. There is no server 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 via SSH is available as a supervised action in your dashboard, with a single 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, its APIs, and your data. Nothing belonging to your application is out of your reach.
This also reduces your attack surface: there is no SSH key to rotate, leak, or be brute-forced.
If the dashboard does not provide an option you need, please let us know. Extending the configuration page is how the platform evolves.

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

No provisioning. No operating system updates to apply. No backup scripts to write or test. No monitoring stack to set up. No on-call rota to cover.

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

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

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

Outside these hours, your services are monitored 24/7.
If downtime is detected, automated remediation is triggered immediately, and an on-call engineer is alerted if the issue is not resolved.
You do not need to detect the incident yourself, nor do you need to maintain your own on-call rota.

Everything is included. The price displayed on the pricing page is the total amount 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 restorations, updates and version upgrades, TLS certificates, your custom domain, the firewall, monitoring, and premium support.
There are no setup fees, no per-user or per-seat charges, no support add-ons, no traffic costs, 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 covering all your services, presented clearly and easy to understand. Your accounts department 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.

Stackhero is a European company operating under European law.

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

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

It operates on dedicated and isolated infrastructure: an instance reserved exclusively 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, allowing you to control which IPs can access each port.

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

Your data is backed up automatically at least once per day for every service and every plan. Additional backups are also taken 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 once.
You can restore backups at any time, as often as needed, with a single click. There are no restoration fees or 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 9am and finishes at 10am.
The file a.txt will contain data from 9am and b.txt will contain data from 10am.
This is typical in backup systems and presents a significant problem leading to 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 from the backup are taken exactly at the same time.
If your backup starts at 9am, all files will have data from 9am. 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 employs 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 exclusively to you.
This environment is private and isolated from other customers, ensuring a high level of security and optimal performance.
Everything is hosted on a bare-metal server running Stackhero DC OS, our own Linux distribution, with disks physically connected to your instance to provide maximum IOPS.

This isolation is achieved through a dedicated virtual machine for each customer, rather than shared containers on a multi-tenant host.

We use disks that are physically connected to your instances.
We do not 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 is a European company, established 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 external investors, and no exit strategy to plan for.
That stability is crucial when choosing a host for a service you cannot migrate in an afternoon.

As soon as you choose the European region for your service, yes, and in the fullest sense: Stackhero is a European company, subject to European law, with software infrastructure designed and managed in-house, in datacentres located in Europe.
It is not simply a management layer on top of a hyperscaler. No part of your service depends on a non-European provider.

Both benefit from the same platform. A startup can launch its first GitLab Runner in production within two minutes on the smallest plan, then scale up to dozens of vCPUs as the product grows, without changing provider or migrating anything.
Larger organisations have access to 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 is straightforward for accounts to process.
In all cases, you simply need to adjust the size of the instance.

The primary mission of Stackhero 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 recognised 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.