In this guide I will show you how easy it can be to migrate or install a new wordpress in Cloudways , I am going to tell you step by step how to migrate my wordpress that add up to 3 million monthly visits and also how I am going to migrate this same blog that you are reading.
Cloudways is undoubtedly one of the best hosting providers in the United States that I could find after a long search, in cloudways you can create your own server in services with a reputation for cloud hosting such as DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform. The good thing about Cloudways is that for a small additional cost they make everything much easier, they give you additional essential and free services, they give you a very secure server, they manage your server and / or you can manage it yourself, as simple as managing a shared hosting.
Currently I had my two main wordpress on a dedicated server in a hosting company in the United States , an option that today can already be considered a little dated. They are two wordpress that can be considered great, between the two they add about 2 million monthly views, so that the consumption of resources can be very large, with my dedicated server I spent about $ 170 dollars per month, between paying (server + CDN + Amazon S3 for backups) in addition to that the server did not have a control panel and although it was very, very well optimized, managing it was very complicated and it was another additional cost that a sysadmin charged me every time I had problems. To give you an idea, installing an SSL certificate at each site cost me $ 200, something that you can do for free in cloudways and in less than 1 minute.
Advantages of having your hosting in Cloudways
- The cost is without a doubt the biggest advantage, you have a managed VPS in the cloud from just $ 10 a month.
- You have a free trial without the need for a credit card, so you can try their service. I’m pretty sure you won’t want to go anywhere after the free trial though.
- Very simple to manage and with access to everything from a simple control panel, you can see the consumption of resources, the status of your services, modify the variables of php, activate the ssl, activate the smtp, and an endless number of options.
- They make very safe and optimized installations, if you decide to install for example wordpress; They install it under php 7 with very interesting options like Varnish, Memcached, Nginx and many other services that will make your wordpress work super fast, your website loads very fast and also optimize the consumption of resources.
- Nowadays it is very important to have an SSL certificate, that is, that your site loads securely using https, and in cloudways it is completely free and so easy to install that you only need to make 1 click and wait 1 minute.
- You have space for completely free backups, every day they make a backup of your entire server
- For only $ 1 a month you can activate the CDN, a service for which I paid about $ 30 a month I have it for only $ 1 a dollar, of course you only have 25Gb per month, but it is more than enough for a site with about 1000 visits a day; And if you need more, you only pay $ 0.04 dollars for each additional GB … A real bargain; and I recommend you to use this option since your site will load much faster.
- They automatically install a cache plugin in your wordpress that is already configured and works very well.
- They give you access to a plugin that will allow you to migrate your wordpress super fast and without any error, I migrated my main wordpress that weighed 19Gb without any problem and in less than 1 hour. In addition to the fact that my site was not offline for a single minute, keep reading that below I show you how it is done.
- If your server is too small, and I hope it is so, you can migrate to a better server with more resources, with a single click and without losing any data or airtime.
Preparing your wordpress for its migration to Cloudways
I recommend you have your website very well before doing the migration, and by good I mean to have your wordpress updated to the latest version, in addition to the plugins.
On the other hand, remember that for approximately 24 hours, you should not write new entries or make changes to your wordpress, as these changes will surely be lost when migrating. In other words, you start the migration and leave your wordpress for 1 day to be sure that nothing will fail.
Depending on where you have your domain, your website may not be offline at any time, in others, for example where I have my domains which is Goddady, your site may be offline for about 30 to 60 minutes, so I recommend you do migration in the early hours of the morning or when you know there are fewer people on your site.
If you are going to migrate your wordpress with the cloudways plugin you have to take into account that said plugin will only migrate your wordpress. In other words, if you have subdomains or perhaps directories with other things, the plugin will not take them into account and you will have to manually migrate them using your FTP.
To make everything much more didactic , next I am going to show you step by step how I am going to migrate this same wordpress that you are reading “ Colsitio.com ” also later I am going to explain to you how to install the SSL certificate that by pure carelessness I do not have and I will also activate Cloudways free cache plugin, CDN and backups.
If you want to start or install a completely new wordpress in Cloudways you can skip step 2 of this guide.
Leaving the above clear and explained, we will start with the guide to migrate or install wordpress in Cloudways, I hope to be as clear as possible and remember that if you have any questions you can gladly ask and I will answer it in the comments.
1. How to create a new server with wordpress in Cloudways
1.1 You enter Cloudways from this link:
1.2 You go to GET STARTED FREE
1.3 Create your account which is very easy: email, password and answer two questions, you can also create it with your Linkedin, Github or Google account.
1.4 Already in your control panel, we go to “Add Server”
1.5 This is the most important step, pay attention. Here you are going to create the new server, as it is a wordpress so we are going to select as follows:
- Select your Application: We select WordPress in the latest available version
- Name Your managed app: I recommend putting your domain, in our case Colsitio or Colsitio.com
- Name Your Managed Server: The name you want for your server, can be the same domain name, or something like “colsite server”
- Select your Project: Before you have to create a project, projects are like categories to keep your servers organized, you add the one you want.
- Select provider: Cloudways works with many providers of cloud servers, I recommend creating it in DigitalOcean since they are the cheapest and are very powerful servers
- Server Size: This step is very important since it depends on how big and how optimized your wordpress is, if your wordpress is not very optimized then the smallest 1GB server will work perfectly for you and will hold up to around 2000 to 5000 daily visits, in my case this server supports me up to 20,000 daily visits in one of my blogs, but because this blog is super optimized. I recommend you start with the smallest 1GB for $ 10 / month, then if you see that you need more resources, then with a single click you can go to a more powerful one in seconds and without your wordpress being down.
- Location: How we select the server in DigitalOcean, they also give us many options of where we want our server to be located, for this you must know where your visitors come from, for example if they are from Latin America, the best location is in New York, if your visitors are from Europe, so you select Amsterdang for example.
- And that’s it, we click on “LAUNCH NOW” and your server will start to create, it can take just 2 to 5 minutes. Cloudways will always keep you updated by email.
1.6 Let’s go to Applications and click on your new site
1.7 This step is very important, we are going to create the master username and password for this application, with that username and password you can access your site using SFTP or SSH, in addition to being necessary for migration in the next step
Simply in “APPLICATION CREDENTIALS” we enter the user in “Username” and the password in “Password”, I recommend a very strong password, where you use lowercase, uppercase, numbers and special characters. And click on “ADD” to create it.
2. How to migrate your wordpress to Cloudways
2.1 Enter your control panel of your current wordpress, the wordpress panel that you want to migrate
2.2 You go to the plugins option, add a new plugin
2.3 You search for the Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin , install it and activate it
2.4 You go to your Cloudways control panel
2.5 Select the Applications option
2.6 And then click on the application you created
2.7 In the “ACCESS DETAILS” screen you already have all the information to continue
2.8 Now in another screen or window you open the Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin configurator
2.9 Enter all the data that you find all in your “ACCESS DETAILS” of cloudways and you will have something like this:
- Email: The email where you want to be notified when the migration is complete
- Database Name: The name of the database you find in your cloudways “ACCESS DETAILS” panel
- SFTP Username: The user we created earlier
- Destination Site URL: The provisional url of your worpresss that you find in your “ACCESS DETAILS” panel of cloudways
- Server Public IP Address: The IP of your server that you find in your cloudways “ACCESS DETAILS” panel
- SFTP Password: The password of the user that we created previously
Click on Migrate and wait while your site is migrated, it may take several minutes depending on the size of your wordpress, when it finishes you will receive an email with the result
After it finishes migrating, then you go to the provisional URL and verify that your site is already seen correctly, if everything is fine then we continue to step 4.
4. How to target your domain to Cloudways
4.1 Now in your Cloudways control panel, and within your application, we go to the “Domain Management” option
4.2 In “PRIMARY DOMAIN” you enter your main domain, IMPORTANT : remember to take into account if you use your domain with or without www since you have to put it that way. Finally you click on “SAVE CHANGES” and wait for your domain to be added
4.3 Now comes the part where I can only help you if you use Godaddy as your domain provider, although I leave you a link to a guide to configure it also in Namecheap or in Dreamhost. Anyway it is not very complicated, it is about creating an A record in your domain, pointing to the IP of your new server.
- Create A record in Namecheap
- Create A record in Dreamhost
4.4 Create A record in Godaddy: We enter our domain manager in godaddy
4.5 We enter the option of “DNS configuration” or “configuration of server names”
4.6 If you had your domain with your old DNS then you enter this edit them in the “Change” option, if your domain is new then you can go to step 4.9
4.7 Now in “Name Servers” select the option “Default” and then click “Save”
4.8 You have to wait approximately 5 to 10 minutes for the records to appear and the option to add your own record, when something similar to this appears, then we continue
4.9 Now you click on the edit icon of record A
4.10 You only modify “Point to” where you must put the IP of your new cloudways server and click “Save”
4.11 Now to wait for the DNS to spread, I recommend you to use the tool https://www.whatsmydns.net/ to verify when the new DNS spread around the world. The tool can tell you that your site is already loading from its new server, but the truth is that it will take up to 24 hours for everything to be perfect, so you just have to wait 24 hours constantly monitoring your site to see that it is not there are problems, which should not exist.
5. How to configure your wordpress backups for free
This was one of the options that I had the most in mind to finally choose Cloudways, they give you completely free backups
You do not have to activate this option since it is active by default, however it is better to be completely safe and make the first backup of your site immediately
5.1 Go to “Servers” and select your server
5.2 Now you go to the “Backups” option and check all the options, I recommend you make a daily backup and retain them for 1 week. these copies are going to be kept apart from your server, so they will not consume disk space, however you can also activate local copies on your hard drive from the “LOCAL BACKUPS” option
5.3 We go to the option “TAKE BACKUP NOW” to generate our first backup. And that’s it.
6. Additional guides
Since you have your WordPress working on your new and super fast cloudways server, then I am going to put some additional guides to make your site work very well, basically I am going to explain step by step how to optimize and above all have a super secure wordpress thanks to the incredible tools that cloudways offers us.
