WordPress is gaining a lot of fame in the world of Content Management Systems (CMS). More than 27% of the web is currently based on WordPress software.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a blogger or an agency running an online store, WordPress could be the best and easy solution for your needs.
Creating a website on WordPress is one thing, but retaining it in the long run by making it profitable is another. So, what helps you to achieve this and doesn’t put your data at security risk?
The answer is simple, choose a reliable WordPress hosting platform. It ensures that your website will not suffer any downtime, give ultimate performance and is secure. You must have heard about Shared, Dedicated and VPS hosting.
However, the word Cloud Hosting could be a new term for you. That’s because it has emerged rapidly in recent times offering ultimate performance, security and 99.99% uptime.
There are many cloud hosting providers available across the Internet. One such managed cloud hosting provider is Cloudways. It is one of the fastest-growing cloud hosting providers in the WordPress hosting niche.
Today, we are going to learn what Cloudways is and how you can launch your very own WordPress on the cloud in just a few clicks.
What is Cloudways?
Cloudways is one of the Managed Cloud Hosting platforms specialized in WordPress Hosting. You can say, it is a bridge between You and different Cloud providers.
It takes care of all your server-side headaches and meeting WordPress software requirements, allowing you to completely focus on your business rather than hiring a high-paid sysadmin to manage a server.
We will not get into the depth of Cloudways as we will leave that up to you. Although we have covered basic features of Cloudways later in the blog, you can explore the rest during your free time.
Let’s get started by installing WordPress on it.
Installing WordPress on Cloudways
Installing WordPress on Cloudways is only a matter of few clicks.
All you need to do is select your application (WordPress), choose your Cloud provider (AWS, GCE, DigitalOcean, Vultr, KYUP), set necessary attributes (bandwidth, server size, etc.) and click launch. There, you are all done!
To demonstrate the installation, let’s start by creating a 14-days FREE trial on DigitalOcean via Cloudways.
Don’t forget to use the Cloudways coupon code: WPISM to get 25% OFF for Three Months on your plans.
After creating an account and verifying your email address. Log in to your account and click on the Launch button. It will take you to the Servers tab.
A new window will pop up from where you can choose your desired application and create a server. Select WordPress from the first drop-down.
P.S: If you plan to launch an eCommerce store, choose WordPress with WooCommerce from the dropdown, as it is purely optimized for an online store. The same goes for WordPress Multisite.
Some of the text boxes labelled above are as follows:
- Name Your App: The unique name of your WordPress installation. It will ease your query of identifying the application if you have launched many.
- Name Your Server: You can name your server too, just to identify a specific server among others.
- Select Your Project: The Project option is like a folder where you can put projects/applications with similar features in a single place. By default, it is set to the default project.
Moving down the launch sequence, the next step is to Create a Server. Choose your desired cloud infrastructure from a number of available options. For now, I will select DigitalOcean. It provides a 14-days free trial while others offer 3-days trial sessions.
After selecting the cloud provider, choose the RAM in Server Size tab. For a live site, we suggest you have at least a 1GB RAM server.
Then, the final step is to choose your Server Location from a list of available options globally. It is always recommended to choose a location that is nearest to your targeted audience.
Finally, hit the Launch Server button at the bottom right.
And you are done with creating a server and launching a WordPress site on Cloudways.
Access WordPress Website
Once the server is launched, navigate to the Applications tab at the top left corner of your screen. There, you can easily find your WordPress application.
You can always add more applications on the same server by clicking on the Add Application button. For now, select the installed WordPress application to know what’s in it.
With the launch of the server, your WordPress website will automatically be ready. Doesn’t that sound great? No extra hassles.
To access your recently launched WordPress application Click on the URL under the Admin Panel label.
You will be directed to a WordPress admin login screen which will appear in a new tab.
Use the default Username and Password listed above to access the admin dashboard.
As you can see there is a WordPress cache plugin called Breeze installed on your website.
This cache plugin was developed by Cloudways to further boost the performance of WordPress-based websites.
That’s all there is to launching WordPress from Cloudways. Now, you can play with your WordPress application. If you want to know more about Cloudways, then read on!
Let’s understand a bit about the backend of Cloudways.
There are two important sections at Cloudways
- Application Management
- Server Management
Explore Application Management – Cloudways
The Application Tab allows you to manage your WordPress application with ease. You might get confused about what other labels refers to, so let me help you understand it a bit better.
- Access Detail: Access Detail allows you to have the default WordPress website URL and admin area access. Beside Access Details, you can find MySQL database credentials.
- Domain Management: It allows you to take your website live. You can point your domain from here.
- Cron Job Management: It provides a Cron Job Manager for your Application.
- SSL Certificate: You can add FREE SSL certificate in just 1-click from here.
- Restore: It allows you to Restore your application from available backups.
- Deployment via Git: It lets you connect your Git account with your application from here.
- Application Settings: It allows you to change general application settings such as Varnish, PHP-FPM, Folder name, etc.
- Application Add-Ons: All application related add-ons can be enabled, configured and disabled from here.
- Migrator Tools: You can migrate your WordPress site from other hosting to Cloudways.
- CloudwaysCDN: It is an optional service, which you can avail on $1/25GB/month per application.
Explore Server Management – Cloudways
Hopefully, you have understood the application management tab.
Now, let’s see what you can do with your server. Navigate to the Servers tab from the top left screen. You can find all created servers listed here.
You can launch as many servers as you want by clicking on the Add Server button. For now, access the server that we have launched recently.
Once again, there are a number of options available to handle your server. Let’s explore them one by one.
- Master Credentials: Here you will have FTP credentials to access files of any application within this server.
- Monitoring: You can monitor server usage from here.
- Manager Services: Cloudways bundles with lots of server-side features like Apache, PHP-FPM, Nginx, Varnish, etc. You can control them all from here.
- Settings & Packages: Use this tab for HTTP2, PHP, Elasticsearch etc settings.
- Security: You can manage security settings from here.
- Vertical Scaling: You can scale your server size from here directly.
- Backups: You can manage backup frequency from here.
- Add-Ons: All your server related add-ons can be found in this tab.
WordPress Performance on Cloudways
You can get exceptionally fast performance for your WordPress application at Cloudways.
As we have talked a lot about it, let’s have a practical experience by analyzing WordPress installation and performance at Cloudways with Pingdom. Here are the results.
We kept the following configurations:
- WordPress 4.7.1
- PHP 7
- MySQL 5.6
- HTTP/2
- Let’s Encrypt
- Server: New York
- Tested from New York
- Varnish & W3TC Enabled
The results look great! Faster than 99% of tested websites! Now that’s an excellent speed. However, if you want to get more speed, you can add a CDN too!
Cloudways Features:
Besides advanced caching technologies, Cloudways is packed with a lot of features for both server and application. What makes Cloudways standalone in the market is what it offers. It comes with
- A Pay-As-You-Go pricing system.
- Unlimited Applications.
- Staging Areas & URL.
- 24x7x365 Live Chat Support.
- HTTP2.
- Real-Time Monitoring.
- Team Collaboration.
- Platform Level Firewalls.
- SSH & SFTP Access.
- Git Deployment.
- Multiple Databases & Add-ons.
- Cloudways API & CloudwaysBot.
- Single Click Installations, Cloning, Domain Mapping, FREE SSL, Backup, Scaling & Restore.
Cloudways Infrastructure Providers
To provide maximum uptime, security and performance Cloudways is partnered with one of the top Cloud Infrastructure providers in the world.
Some of the reliable names on the market are DigitalOcean, Vultr, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine and Kyup (Container-based cloud provider).
You can now deploy your applications on any one of these infrastructures with just a handful number of clicks.
Cloudways Pricing
As far as the pricing is concerned, only a few cloud hosting provider offers a Pay-As-You-Go pricing system, and Cloudways is one of them.
It means that you are only accountable to pay for what you have consumed. Assuming that you have recently launched a server on the 20th of a month, you will only be charged for ten days and not the entire month instead.
Sounds good? Because it is 🙂
Oh and btw you only have to pay for your server, regardless of the number of applications you have installed on it!
Get started with hosting on Cloudways
Doesn’t it sound easy to host WordPress on different cloud providers at Cloudways rather than hosting it directly?
If you are a non-techie that don’t know sys-admin stuff, you might have to hire a big-budget professional just to manage your server.
Don’t worry! We got it all covered at Cloudways. A highly dedicated team is already there to help you out. So make a step ahead and experience the power of cloud hosting.
Don’t forget to use the Cloudways hosting coupon code: WPISM to get 25% OFF for Three Months of your hosting plans.
