https://youtube.com/watch?v=YoZ0IWImZUk
hi everyone in today's video I'm going to be giving you a review of the cloudways hosting platform as well as a complete tutorial on how to set up a WordPress website on cloudways how to migrate an existing website from other providers onto cloudways first of all I just want to clarify why cloudways is very different to Shared hosting providers so cloudways is a so-called Cloud Server type of hosting and if you look at this diagram here this is how cloudways is different so cloudways will have a Cloud Server and your website will be consuming and it will be owning 100% of the resources of that cloudway server so you will effectively have your own server on which your website will reside and that makes a huge difference because your website will be extremely fast it will be fast for you to to log in to do things on the website it'll feel kind of like a desktop computer and also it will be extremely fast for the visitors of your website Who come onto your side there won't be any delays um when you compare that to a standard shared hosting uh type scenario okay you will see that imagine this is a shared hosting server something like sideg ground go dat Etc they're cheap plans you will generally have a shared hosting server and there will be your website that's located on This Server as well as probably dozens and maybe even hundreds of other websites that are using this same server if if you look at the pricing for cloudways you can see that right now because of the Black Friday special you able to get it for $840 per month that will be the cheapest type of plan but even without this special discount you quite often are able to get it for almost the same price as you would pay to a shared hosting provider but you'll get a ton of additional benefits by being on cloudways the first is speed all of my websites that I care about are actually on cloudways and the reason I do this is because of the performance with cloudways everything just works extremely fast perhaps you've been in a scenario where you're trying to edit something on your website or in WordPress and you you click save or you try to navigate to another menu and you know you wait like 10 or 20 seconds for something to load cloudways is just very fast because you've got a dedicated uh Cloud Server on which your website is so you don't have those problems and I value my time that's one thing second thing is that for your visitors your website will be incredibly fast as well and that is important from the perspective of search engine optimization because Google search hates slow websites so you can increase your traffic to your website just by being on a fast hosting solution if you're a little bit more technical then I'll just mention this that uh with cloudways you basically can choose the infrastructure to be from digital ocean vulture linode AWS or Google Cloud I won't go too much into technical detail I personally use the digital ocean option there are a ton of security features with cloudways there are Auto scaling options so if you need more resources or less resources uh it can scale automatically for you and you can downscale it if you no longer have the need for the upscale resources if you have a hight trffic website then you might be interested in this information there is actually virtually no cap with cloudways uh in terms of the number of monthly visitors you may be aware that other hosting providers sometimes cap your monthly visitors so you can see here WP engine and kinsta some of their plans are actually kept the other thing that I personally really care about is cloudways support it's rare that I need help because normally nothing goes wrong it's just when I'm trying to change something on cloudways but every time I've needed support I'm able to just jump online and use the 24/7 live chat and they reply virtually instantly really helpful and in my personal experience they were excellent they were able to resolve the issue virtually right away they knew exactly what the problem was they understood the problem instantly and solved it so for me this is very very important because I value my time all right so how do you get started well you can go to the cloudways website or you're welcome to click the link in the description below in the description you'll find the current special deal which is the Black Friday special where you can log in a 40% off for four months deal but even after the Black Friday special if you click my link there's generally going to be a discount coupon if you go via my link the discount changes but it it's usually something around 20 to 25% off for the first 3 months once you're on the sign up page enter all of your information and click Start free you're going to get a notification via email from cloudways so just click the activate account now and here you will be prompted to create the service so first of all choose the version of WordPress or another platform that you'd like to install you also have the choice of magenta larel PHP woocommerce but this is a WordPress tutorial so let's just choose version 6 to2 of WordPress let's give this application a name then fill out these details application will be the name of your actual website for the server this will be the name of your server on which you can host more than one website and project name so project is kind of like a folder to which you can tag your servers and your sites so don't worry too much about this you can just change these later anyway so after that select your server type so here you've got a choice of digital ocean vulture Leno Amazon or Google and this is just different in infrastructure that you can have for your cloudways service I am personally on digital digital Ocean on the one gigabyte plan that's what you can get started on and this is the cheapest one so it's 660 a month right now with a special discount but the normal price is $11 and you can actually choose your location so if you know roughly where the majority of your traffic is going to be coming from it's a good idea to choose the server that is closest to that location of your traffic because then you will get the highest speed so if you know that most of your traffic will be be from Australia you can choose Sydney as the location uh if you're not sure and you think the traffic is going to be worldwide then choose any of them you can't really go wrong in that instance but here we can just choose New York okay don't worry about this warning too much because cloudways is actually pretty fast and to be honest I was on the 1 Gigabyte plan for a long time I actually had several websites running on the 1 Gigabyte plan okay so after you have selected all of this okay you can go and launch for free okay so our account and our server is now active so you can now switch between servers and applications and an application is essentially your website if you add another application it will be linked to the same server that's how this works so we're now within the application let's go to Greg's site this is where our WordPress website has been installed to Greg's site and basically if you want to you can go straight into your WordPress installation so here you can see application URL and if we click on this button it will open up our default WordPress installation with the default WordPress theme and if you would like to log in straight to WordPress Administration panel you can do this just click this link and it will go straight into the admin panel for your WordPress installation now of course your website right now looks very very empty but this is because this is just the default Bare Bones theme that is installed and you can customize it now from these admin panel now to get your username and password you can go over here your username will generally be your email address so we can grab that and for to get to reveal your password you can click this button to actually show it to you I'm not going to do this here now publicly but I can copy this password from here and then just enter that in Click remember me and log in and we will go straight into the backend area of our WordPress installation right now you will notice that the domain name is WordPress DS somethings something.
cloudways app . so the WordPress installation right now is working on the cloudways domain I will show you later on in this video how to move this to your own custom domain but basically now with a free trial you've got 3 days to give it a good test drive work on your web press site check out the service of cloudways and hopefully discover that it's great just like I have been very impressed with them hopefully you're going to like it as well so there are a couple of settings changes that I apply generally on every website you will want to change site title so change that let's click save changes then you'll also want to double check your per links option it should be set to post name this will create better links and better URLs for you so just click save changes and now we'll want to change the appearance so go to appearance themes now by the way I if you haven't noticed check how quickly everything is I click on a page let's say I go to posts or I go to Pages it loads instantly I don't know know what your experience has been but on many shared providers you sometimes have to wait 10 20 seconds but cloudways is extremely fast so I'm in appearance themes now and let's click add new theme this will allow us to start creating a nicer looking version of the site you probably know which theme to use already but I'm just going to show you how the Astra theme works it's free to install going to click activate it now and now with Astra you can use these stter templates so Astra actually has quite a lot of stter templates that are free for you to use they do have some paid plans as well but you don't need to worry about this at least for this video okay and now how would you like to build your website well I recommend to just go with a classic starter template then you can choose your page builder block editor Elementor or Beaver Builder I'm just going to go with block editor because that's the simplest and what I'm familiar with then you can choose the category of the website that you'd like to go with so here I'm going to go professionals and then choose consultant and you can see these are the templates you'll notice some of them are marked as premium you need a special subscription for that but many of them don't actually have the premium sign so you can use that template for free so let's say I choose this template just click on it here you can customize it you can preview it you can go from page to page to see how it's going to look and then basically you can change some default settings like font Pairs and color pallets if you want to change the colors you can do that just from here once you're happy with everything go continue if you're familiar with any of these and you need them you can add them if not then just click continue you don't actually need to fill fill all of these out if you don't want to then just click submit and build my site okay the template is installed so we now can click here to view your website and you're going to see what it looks like this is a preview of course you can change every single thing on this page and on the website everywhere to change any of the settings of your website you can go into the applications area within cloudways and in all of these tabs is where you can change the server side settings for your website for example to change the database name and username you can do that from over here then to monitor analytics logs and so forth everything is within the monitoring area application security if you want to see any incidents or you want to see the details about malware protection that is all contained over here domain management we're going to get to that in just a second but once you're ready to actually use your own domain for your website you can add your domain here we're going to do that together in just a second Chron drob management all the Chron jobs are visible over here SSL certificate we're going to do that together once we actually get your full domain name under application settings you'll find the settings related to PHP varnish which is a caching application https redirection and all of that good stuff is contained over here anything specific to WordPress you will find over here as well so you can turn on for example the Chrome Optimizer if you want to do that from over this area varnish settings which is the caching settings are contained over here as well and if you want to change anything that is specific to This Server which will affect all of your applications at once or all of the websites at once you can go that to servers and then click on Greg server and this is where you can get the server level um settings changed so as an example you can go into manage services and you can restart or shut down any of the running Services over here for settings and packages if you need to change all these details like upload file sizes execution limits packages of PHP versions and so forth all of that can be done from the server settings Pages all right now I'll show you how to migrate your existing website if you decide to do that onto cloudways so go back into the application settings make sure that you are within the WordPress settings area for your site then go on the migration tools now here you will see that there is um cloudways WordPress migration tool okay so you can download this plugin alternatively you can go straight into your website and then just go into plug plugins over here click on add new plugin and look for cloudways migration plugin you will see cloudways WordPress migrator so this is the same plugin just make sure that you're installing the right one that is by cloudways okay and then once you click install now and activate it you'll be asked to enter your email address and then you can work through the manual migration pathway over here just enter all of the information it's quite self-explanatory in terms of how to use all of these but what I want to bring to your attention is that free migrations that are included so you can simply contact cloudway support and they will actually do this for you so if you don't want to do it manually yourself you can go into support so click NE a hand over here like this and then just go through Okay click on messages click on send us a message okay and you will see one of the areas here is DNS migration take website live so just choose that and then chat to them I've typed in migrate and you can see actually here it says you can also request us for manage migration so our Engineers can do all the heavy lifting for you check the article below to request a manage migration now so that's probably the simplest way if you're comfortable with someone else migrating your website so let's say you have migrated your website and you want to now take your website live how do we do this so right now your website is live but it's live at this address which is WordPress dsom something cloudways apps.com so to move it to your own domain you will need to open the Service where your domain is registered you might be using blue host the go Dad or name chip for your domain registration I use name chip for everything it's just simple and easy so navigate to the settings and if you don't have a domain yet it's very easy to buy it through name chip just go name chip.com and here you can register the domain name to see whether it's actually available so let's say I want to register DJing domain that'ss can dj.com let's click search and it'll tell us whether it's available or not so you can purchase the domain that you want over here yes this one is available so you can just go ahead and add it to card I'm going to use this domain dad's condense because it's already registered this is like a testing domain that I've got and then we'll just need to connect this domain to our website through this area so just go to domain management click on ADD domain all right so we've got that here that'sand dan.com and we can now click save changes after this let's go back to our server settings and we will need this info over here which is the public IP so let's just grab that let's copy this public IP then Within the settings of your domain make sure you don't have any redirects I had my redirect from a previous tutorial so I'm going to delete this just make sure that redirects are not entered then go into Advan DNS if you have any a record or cname record over here you can safely delete these okay so I'm just going to delete these and I'm going to set them up from scratch so I'm going to go add new record a record then I'm going to enter at and then I'm going to paste this IP address so the IP address of my server is going to go in as an a record host will be this wild card and then we're going to click save changes and after this we want a new record C name record so under host we want to put in www and then in value we'll want to enter the actual domain itself over here so just put that in here and click save now let's get back to our application so back to the WordPress level and here you can go into domain management and if you haven't add added your url over here so your domain name you can enter that over here now so click add domain and do it but we did it together in a previous step so I've already got this added now let's click these three dots and click make primary this way it'll be set up as a primary domain so now all of the data for our WordPress all the website that we may have migrated or set up ourselves from scratch everything is going to be accessed via our custom URL via dad skin dan.com instead of the previous one that we had which was this holding URL WordPress D something something.
cloudway apps.com so kind of now moving everything to this domain over here okay so you can see now that condense has been set as primary so now that this is done and it's connected we can go into SSL certificate and let's just issue an SSL certificate so this is to prevent any security access errors you should generally use let's encrypt it free if you have your own custom SSL um you can use that as well but I use let's encrypt on all my sites and the email address and then we will copy this over here I'll click add domain and I'll also want to do the www. version to add it to both of them okay and now we can click install certificate in case you're not sure what SSL certificate does maybe you've seen these errors on websites before where it says https than the name of the website but it's says your connection is not private so this is what this SSL certificate does it's a security certificate and you need to activate it over here in cloudways in order for that error not to appear all right and now we can see that the SSL certificate has been installed uh on both domain and the www.
Doain so now if we try to open that cond dan.com you will see that it now loads correctly and it is now secured with the a https and the SSL certificate is working correctly so you can browse your website you can notice how fast it's actually loading and everything is now good to go I hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you did then please hit the like button just underneath this video subscribe to my YouTube channel for more videos like this and go ahead and watch this video over here next this video over here is a stepbystep tutorial that will show you how to start from nothing build your website and start earning from free traffic using a website so go ahead and watch this next thank you so much I'll see you in the next video
