In recent years almost everything is cloud based. All the business are moving to cloud. Why should not they be ? It’s easy to maintain, no more hardware upgrade and maintenance etc. So in this list of cloud servers or systems, we will discuss about the cloudways hosting services for application hosting.
We will see how easy it is tp setup a a server using cloudways. Will create another post to install a simple application on this server, so make sure you are subscribed and getting the updates.
To start with you will need to register for a cloudways account. Go ahead and create an account FREE : https://www.cloudways.com/
Once you are logged in to the system, you should see the below screen.
Use the “Launch now” button to start the process of selecting a service and setting up the server. Using the below screen you will be able to select the provider of the service. Advantage, you don’t have to signup for different services. You can select any service provider for any project by just using cloudways. Compare between services to see the cost of the servers. For example, I have an application running on AWS which is costing me USD $80 per month. I am going to move the application to DigitalOcean and that would cost me USD $50 per month.
Setting up the cloudways hosting
For this post we will use DigitalOcean. So, let’s get started.
As this stage select the kind of application you will be hosting on this server. You can see the screenshot that, the first dropdown has a list of prebuild templates to select from. I will be using WordPress for now as a scope of this post. Will see other applications in future posts.
The list has the below applications:
- WordPress
- Woocommece
- PHP
- Laravel
- Magento
Once selected the DigitalOcean as the service, select the location of the server. Note, that for SEO and speed purpose, select the server location, close to your target country. I am going to select Toronto location for my use case. I am hosting this application, which need not to be on google search. Below is the message that comes after you click on “Launch now”.
At this point the server is being built and getting it ready for use, See the below screen where you will see the www folder once the server is ready to host your application.
Server Details
Click on the www or anywhere on that row and it will give you the details about, how to login and work on your server. On the left had side you will go to Master Credentials to get the login details for SSH or SFTP. At this point if you hit the IP shown on the screen, you will see the application is not yet ready to be published and you will get website unavailable page as below.
Monitoring
Monitoring server resources is important for ensuring server health and problem-free operation of your server. This section presents key server resources utilization statistics and graphs so that you have a quick and easy way of monitoring your server’s resources. This section will also let you see the memory usage, free disk space and CPU usage etc.
Manage Services
Control Core Services that allow your application(s) to run. Changing these settings may break your web app’s functioning. If you love command prompt, still you can use SSH but this is the good to have tool in hand.
Settings & Packages
Manage various server-level settings as well as packages. You can change the version of the packages as well. Just click the Edit pencil icon and make the changes.
Security
Manage security settings, whitelist your IP and/or IP subnets for SSH/SFTP and MySQL connections.
Vertical Scaling
Increase your server size. Note that with vertical scaling on DigitalOcean you can only increase the server size, and that scaling down is only possible through the cloning feature.
Backups
Manage your Backup preferences here. Schedule your backups so that in case of a failure your have something to go back.
SMTP
Configure SMTP service to setup outgoing email delivery on your Server. You can choose between your own SMTP account or Elastic Email (Paid). This is an addon. The price is also good and very competitive. You can bring in your own SMTP service as well. Just configure your SMTP details there to send out the emails from the system.
Conclusion
That’s it. It’s the start of a 2 or possibly 3 part post. The next post we will talk about hosting the application and making changes to the hosted application files. Till then stay safe. Keep reading and sharing ……
Leave a Reply