As we often recommend Cloudways as an excellent mechanism through which to access cloud instances from providers like AWS, Vultr, Digital Ocean, Linode and Google Cloud Platform, without taking on the technical debt of managing your own stack, particularly for WordPress and WooCommerce clients, we often find we are repeating some instructions.
As a result, we’re producing a series of short, informative videos and articles for our clients – and the wider community – to help users to get to grips with signing up, using, scaling up (and back down) cloud instances purchased through Cloudways.
You can find the information below.
Table of Contents
Signing up with Cloudways
Regardless of which package you select, you can sign up with Cloudways by clicking here, and then clicking the “Get Started Free” button, which is usually green.
A free 3 day trial?
Cloudways offers a free 3 day trial to new customers, but note this only applies to the smaller packages, and therefore, may not be appropriate for all clients we recommend to use the service (i.e. those on larger instances), because, in these cases, Cloudways sensibly will ask new clients to add funds to their account before they can scale up. This is to avoid abuse, and applies only in month one (to avoid you signing up for a huge machine and never paying… as you can imagine, this would otherwise happen 🙂 ).
In my video guide, below, I’ll show you where to add your billing details, and how to “add funds” to your account too.
Video Guide – Signing Up and adding initial instance
Video Guide – Add your Billing Details & “Add Funds”
Next up, you need to add your account details, setup your billing account – and for larger instances – also to “add funds”. This video shows how to do all those things.
Setting up your Domain with SSL on Cloudways
If you’re signing up a new site, rather than migrating an existing one in, you may be able now to just point your domain into Cloudways.
NOTE Cloudways does not provide domain hosting, nor nameservers or DNS services. We use Namecheap and AWS for those services for clients (in case you wondered!) and it is through those services that you would point your domain in to Cloudways server IP.
The video below tells you how to do this part, as well as setting up SSL.
Setting up Staging in Cloudways
This is a new feature with Cloudways – setting up staging is really important for testing development and updates first in an exact replica of your WordPress site or WooCommerce store. The video below explains how to setup staging in Cloudways, point a staging domain in, and setup SSL on this (important if your live store uses SSL).
Help with anything else?
Above, the effort was to help you familiarise yourself with the normal “getting started” elements of using Cloudways for the first time. If there’s additional elements you’d like help with, leave a comment below. If what you need is likely to be a common point, it can be added to make the above guide more useful for all visitors.
Also if you think something is explained badly, or you’d like more clarification, please do ask a (public) question below. This will help to improve this resource for all.
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