When building out your WordPress website, one of the critical decisions you’ll need to make is choosing the right hosting platform. Cloudways, a managed WordPress hosting platform, offers a seamless way to set up and manage WordPress servers and applications. In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through setting up hosting on Cloudways, including setting up your server and initial application.
Why Choose Cloudways Hosting?
Before we dive into the setup process, let’s quickly understand why Cloudways might be the right choice for your hosting needs. If you’d like to read about all of the hosting platforms we recommend, click here.
Managed Cloud Hosting: Cloudways offers a managed hosting solution, which means they take care of server management tasks, security updates, and performance optimization, allowing you to focus on your content or business.
Daily Backups: Cloudways automatically backs up your website for you every day. They also offer one-click backups and restores, which makes backing up your site, or restoring an earlier version a simple, stress-free process.
Free SSL Certificate: When you sign up for hosting on Cloudways, you get a free, easy-to-install, SSL certificate. This keeps your visitors from seeing that scary “this site is not safe” message, and protects their private information.
Scalability: As your website or application grows, Cloudways makes it easy to scale your server resources up without any hassle.
Step-by-Step Guide: Setting Up a Server on Cloudways
If you’re a visual learner, feel free to skip to the video tutorial below!
Step 1: Sign Up and Choose Your Cloud Provider
Visit the Cloudways website and sign up for an account. You’ll need to provide basic information to create your account.
Step 2: Choose Your Preferred Server Provider, server size and location.
Who to choose? I personally use Digital Ocean but only because it’s who I chose when I first signed up for Cloudways Hosting. I haven’t had any issues so I haven’t had a reason to change to a different server.
What size server? I recommend starting with the smallest size appropriate for you. I use the 2gb for my website, but sites with lower traffic may be able to use the 1gb server. High traffic websites may need 4gb or larger. Also, when hosting on Cloudways, you can have multiple sites on one server. If you plan to do that, you”ll want a larger server as well.
Note: Cloudways makes it very easy to upgrade your server, but it’s a little bit harder to downgrade it.
What location? Choose the location closest to your target market.
Step 3: Launch a Server
Click on the “Servers” tab and then click the “Launch” button. This process can take a few minutes to finish. We recommend going for a quick walk, grabbing a glass of water, or inviting your furry friend a quick petting session.
Setting Up Your Application On Your Cloudways Hosting Server
Step 1: Accessing Your Server
Once your server is up and running, you’ll be able to access the server details from the dashboard.
Step 2: Setting Up WordPress Hosting on Cloudways
From the Cloudways dashboard, go to the “Applications” tab and click “Add Application.”
Choose which version of “WordPress” is right for your application. We recommend either the first WordPress option, which is pre-optimized by Cloudways, or the WooCommerce version if you are opening up an eCommerce website.
Click “Add Application,” and Cloudways will install WordPress for you. This process also takes a few minutes.
Step 3: Confirm the installation was successful!
At this point, we recommend checking out the URL and dashboard (log in with the credentials provided in your application dashboard).
Once you confirm everything is installed correctly, it’s time to update your website settings, install a theme, and add essential plugins to enhance functionality and appearance. Check out our blog for tutorials if you have questions or would like to learn more about that.
