 What's up everyone? I'm Jeffrey at Lightbox and through my years of creating websites for clients as well as providing maintenance plans for clients and hosting websites for them, I've gone through my fair share of hostings. And in this video, I want to explain how I ended up and why I went all in on Cloudways and now host all of our websites over there. I also want to take you through a very quick walkthrough and show you how to get set up with your WordPress and Elementor website on Cloudways and we're going to make it super easy. There are timestamps in the description. So if you want to jump around anywhere, go ahead and see the timestamps and quick disclaimer. In open transparency, this is a sponsored video by Cloudways, but sponsor or no sponsor, I'm always going to keep it real. I'm going to give you my honest opinions, feedback, my pros and cons. I'm not going to hold anything back ever. And I'm only an affiliate to something that I actually use inside my own personal web design business. All right. So really quick, I want to just break down my journey of hosts and how I ended up here. Now, my first one when I was brand new, I started off with GoDaddy. I was brand new web developer, web behind the ears, had no idea about hosting. And I didn't know just how bad GoDaddy was until I got WP engine. And it was just a massive difference in performance and usability. It was great. The problem was I was still a new web developer and I wasn't able to really charge high prices yet. And WP engine was quite expensive. I didn't want to go back to, you know, like GoDaddy or or Bluehost, I experienced a lot of bad hosting from clients from clients that purchased hosts that weren't that great, mostly shared hosting. So I went to Flywheel and I jumped on a promotion with Flywheel. And Flywheel was very similar to WP engine, but I tested the two together. And on Flywheel, the sites actually did just a little bit faster. And I had a really good promotion. So the prices were good at the time. And it was great. I stuck with them for a while. Then I also got SiteGround. And I use SiteGround for our maintenance plans for the clients that were on our lower tier plans because it was cost effective. But the thing with SiteGround is after one year, that price triples. And then also my WordPress maintenance plans started to grow. We started to get clients in different parts of the world. And we needed servers. I needed servers in their locations because if I have all my clients and servers where I'm at, but they're located out in Europe or they're located in the States or Australia, well, they're not going to get the quality performance that they need to get. And getting individual servers inside each region with SiteGround or a WP engine was still very expensive for me. So that's when I started looking into cloud-based hosting. Particularly, I started looking into DigitalOcean. Now the price for DigitalOcean was super low and very attractive. But I felt like I was a bit in over my head. It was very technical. And I know I could figure it out, but it was going to take time. It was going to take a lot of work and then also the upkeep and management. And that's when I stumbled upon Cloudways. And at first, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical when I saw Cloudways because it's different. It's way different from anything else that I use. And that's the reason why I wanted to make this video because I wanted to explain and show how to get set up because I know when I got set up with it, I was skeptical. I was still learning. I wasn't too sure of it because it was so different. So I started off with just one site, my own personal site. I didn't want to test on a client side. I did mine and I was happy with the results. And gradually, I started moving client sites over. And then in about a couple months, I canceled everything. I canceled SiteGround. I canceled Flywheel. And I just been all in on Cloudways. It has been just cost-effective. It's the most cost-effective and highest performing solution for my business that hosts several websites in several locations. And that's how I ended up here and why now I've been with Cloudways for close to two years. Let me go ahead now and show you how to get started. So the first thing you want to do is you want to create your account. There is a link in the description. It's an affiliate link. It doesn't cost you anything extra to use it, but it does help to support this channel is much appreciated. So after you sign up and start your account, you're going to get to a screen like this. Once you've signed up for your account, you're going to get started on a page like this. And here we need to select the server really quick. Let me explain how Cloudways works. What Cloudways does is they set up, optimize and manage the server for you. For example, say you wanted to go with DigitalOcean. To get started on DigitalOcean, you got to set up the server or droplet. Then you got to optimize it for the right environment that you're going to be using. Then you got to install WordPress and then you got to do the upkeep and management on it. It's a bit more technical. It's time consuming. And even for myself, a front-end developer, it's a big learning curve. So with Cloudways, they do all that for you. All you got to do is select the server that you want the server size, and they optimize it. They manage it for you and they have everything built in. Then they also have the other things that are needed with hosting and needed with the website like emails, domain emails, SMTPs and CDNs. So they have all these things already built in also as well. You got five options here. You got DigitalOcean, Linode and Volter. These three are going to be your base three right here. They're all very similar in price and performance. If you're going to be running, say just a regular standard website, these are one of the three to go with. My personal go to has been DigitalOcean. Lately I've been using Volter. I've been happy with both performance has been great. Now, the big guys right here, AWS and Google Cloud Platform, these are like the industry and enterprise level servers right here. They're also a lot more expensive. So I would only use these on something that really needs those kind of resources. If you have a really big platform, if you have something that you know is going to need that extra strength on it and also has a healthy budget to go with it, then you would use these right here. Now, this is where things get really interesting. You see here, we got a selection of the server size. And when you change the size of the server, you'll see down here, the price changes as well. So with the server size, this is what I really like right here. I could always start with the bottom and I recommend starting with the with the bottom one, because I am looking at cost effective solutions. I am looking to save money. I want to save where I need. I don't want to spend more than I have to spend. And if you start with the bottom, and you build your site, and then your site, maybe it starts to get heavier, maybe you have more resources, maybe you got like who commerce or translation plugins on it. You might be getting a lot of traffic and then you need more resources. Well, you could just click a button and move it up anytime later on. You don't have to start big, start small, save your money. And this part right here, this part was something that I really needed. And that was to choose my locations. And there's a lot of choices for the locations. If you got a client that is in the UK, you could go ahead and get them a server that's in London, or if you're located there, same thing with the States and Asia, Europe all over the place. So there's locations all over and you could choose a server. And that's really important to have a server close to where the website traffic is going to be, because the website is just going to be faster there. I mean, it just makes sense if the server is say I'm located in Asia, the servers in Asia, website viewers are in America is going to take a lot longer for that information to go all the way halfway around the planet. So down here now, let me explain this pricing. This is where I was skeptical at because this at first did not make sense to me. So if I choose say this bottom tier, the small package for digital ocean, it's $10 a month, but then it also gives me this price for hourly. So I was a little confused by this, but I did a lot of testing and I figured out what it was. First off, I could say that I've never paid more than what the estimated cost for monthly was. In fact, sometimes I actually paid less. Sometimes I paid less than $10 for the month, but the hourly. So for example, for this video, I created this account and I'm creating this server just for this video. So it's probably only going to be up for like one or two days. Now I'm not going to have to pay the $10 for the whole month. Instead, only pay for the two days. Once I delete the server, I don't have to pay for it anymore. You only pay as you go. And this has been very cost effective. I only scale up when I need it. One of my problems that I had with WP engine and flywheel was I would get the freelancer package, which would be like 10 or 12 websites on there, but maybe I would only have four client websites that are currently on our maintenance plan. So I would have, you know, six or eight empty slots that I was paying for and that were just sitting there and I was losing money on with this one right here. I'm only paying for exactly what I need. And this is why I found this to be the most cost effective solution. Alright, so let's move forward. Let's set up our server. The next step would be to choose your application. The application is going to be your website. So right here you want to choose a regular WordPress. It should be always the updated version multi site, which is really awesome. We're not going to get too much into it. But if you ever want a multi site, I think it's awesome that they have it ready to go here and then the clean without cloudways optimization. And basically that just doesn't add the cloudways optimization app. I usually go with this one because I optimize my websites with WP rocket. And when I'm in development as well, I don't use any optimization. I only do that after development. So let's start with the clean. No cloudways application optimization. I'll leave that up to you. Now let's go ahead and give your application or website a name. My new site, your server, a name, we'll just leave it at your server. And then your project, you could go ahead and create projects. This comes in handy later on if you ever start to manage several clients. Because like myself, I have some clients and they'll have two, three, four, up to five websites. So it's really handy to organize and put the websites all into a project. After everything is set up, go ahead and select on launch now, and give it about five to 10 minutes, and it'll set up your server. So now our server is all set up, let's get started building a website. I'll show you how easy it is and how quickly you could get started building the website. So you'll come to a page like this, there's two places you could go to to find your application or website and just keep in mind anytime you see application that means website. You can either click on this www right here and you'll see your website here or you could go to applications up here and you'll see a list of your websites. We only got one here so let's click on this and here is your access details. You can get started right away with this temporary domain right here that the cloudways gives you just click on this and it'll open it up into a window for you. You could also log in your back panel right here. Let's go back and copy the username so we can log in, copy the password, and you see we're ready to go. The website is now ready to get started with. So you could actually build your site using this temporary domain. Once your site is ready and you're ready to transfer it over and to make your website live what you want to do is you want to go to domain management right here and in here you're going to want to put in your domain. You're going to want to put into say for example I will put in lightbox no HTTP HTTPS or any for slashes. Then I would also add a domain here and I do www you'd want to add both of them not just one of them because that way if somebody does click on www or vice versa without it they both go to your website. Once you have these in here you would go to your access details and this IP address is what you're going to put inside your DNS settings in your A record. I can't show you how to do this in this video because well it all depends on where you purchased your domain from but go back to wherever you purchased your domain. Go to your DNS settings and look for your A record and you want to put in your IP this IP into your domain record and that's how you point and get your website your domain pointed to your website here. That's how quickly it is to get started. After you've connected your domain the next step would be go to the SSL certificate and you want to install it leave it on let's encrypt it's free it's easy to use and you just put in your email address and domain and that's it. Same thing though add on both domains your regular domain and the domain with www. yeah that's it add in both of those you get your SSL install the whole process takes minutes and you're good to go. Your website should be going live it really is kind of it's that easy to go. Now okay so that's it that's how it is to get started on here. You can get started and deployed in in minutes it usually takes me about we got to wait for the server to set up I don't know about 15-20 minutes and I could have a website going live on there. Now there is more value though there's a lot more there's more reasons why I use this and here's one of the biggest reasons why I also am all in with cloudwaist and that's going to be the support. You could always go over here and there is going to be a live chat that you could go to that's always available it's easy to find it's intuitive to use if you've used other platforms you might know that getting support isn't that easy I know a lot of platforms they purposely hide their support and like you might not know this there's a thing called dark UI where people don't want people contacting them so they make it hard to find cloudwaist is complete opposite they make it super easy to find and I've always had nothing but good experiences with their support a couple things too coming up I'm going to be making a video coming up very soon so make sure to subscribe you know all that good YouTube stuff but subscribe so that we can get notified I'm going to show you on the next video how to get set up with the add-ons okay and the add-ons we have our emails so I use rack space and we could add emails really easily and they're a dollar each so you could add several emails with your domain and get that started right away same thing with SMTP that's also built in right with cloudwaist where you won't even need to add plugins to your website for it it's already built in there then we also have other things like cloudwaist CDN and these are the ones that I personally use that they really help out the best thing is they're all built in they're all right together so you don't need extra services it makes a lot easier and super cheap do the price is amazing so I'm going to have a video out very soon that's going to go through more details on cloudwaist more of the settings and also the add-ons so make sure to subscribe that we can get notified also all the cool YouTube stuff you know like leave a comment if you have any questions it does really help I really appreciate you for watching and if you do have any questions please drop them in the comments I get back to everybody and I'd be glad to help thank you for watching I'll be back soon again with more web design and elemental related content thank you