Create Your Own Zapier Alternative with 1-Click! n8n + xCloud Tutorial

I like to talk about automation a lot when it comes to WordPress and integrating it with various different tools. Today I want to quickly talk about xCloud's latest update and how we can now easily with one click, install N8N to have our own dedicated server to handle all the automations we want. The cool thing is once you've got this set up, you basically have your own version of Zapier which you can sort of self host and just kind of manage the whole thing yourself. This is great if you want to use this with clients, with your own projects, a multitude of different things. Now if you're new to to N8N, I'm going to just quickly talk about what it is, what it does and why. You may want to take a look at using this for yourself. So N8N is basically an automation platform. We can use a visual builder to be able to create automations connecting various different applications from WordPress to various different additional tools, Google Docs, those kinds of things. There's a ton of options here. The cool thing about N8N, without getting into too much detail, is that you have a great website with a great community surrounding it. So if you are new to this, there's a lot of resources to get you up and running. Also if you come into the website itself, you can see we can come in and we can take advantage of templates. These have already been created in various different sort of setups that we can use as a starting point or take them as they are and then customize as we need to if we need to. There's a bunch of options inside here. So for example, if you're into marketing, you can see we've got AI powered, Multi Social Media, Post Automation, Google Trends and Perplexity AI which connects out to the likes of Google Sheets, HTTP Requests, Facebook and so on. We can download these and we can utilize these and we can customize them and tweak them for our own benefit. You've also got great AI integration into this. So if you want to create chatbots and so on, you can do that inside N8N. There's so many different possibilities here and it's something I'm literally just getting into myself. So if you'd like me to show you how, get started with this in a couple of weeks, once I've kind of got my head around it a little bit more, then let me know in the comments section down below. But let's take a quick look at how easy this is now to set up with basically one click using xCloud. Now, if you don't know what xCloud is or what this even does, then basically consider this to kind of be a visual interface between you and your cloud hosting platform like DigitalOcean, Vultr, Amazon, S3 and so on. So instead of having to worry about setting up and configuring things directly on those cloud platforms, which can be a a little intimidating and overwhelming, this is a nice visual way of working. So if you're coming off of like Cloudways for example, that basically does the same kind of thing. So let's log into my account and take a quick look at how we can set up this N8N based hosting. Now, I've already set up one N8N test setup and you can see that here. We'll log into that in a moment. But let me show you just how easy this is. All we need to do is come up to add a new site. We'll choose the server, we'll click next, and then we've got a selection of different options. Now, by default, previously you only had the WordPress options in here, but they've expanded this out over the last couple of weeks and months to give us a lot more options. It's not just WordPress based hosting anymore. So we're going to come into the one click apps inside there. You can see Currently we have three options. N8N is the third one we'll click on N8N. This will then bring us over and we can give this a name. We can choose any tags we want to apply to it, whether this is going to go on a live domain, or whether we want to set this up as a demo site to test it out. We can make it live afterwards and this will kind of create a temporary domain on xCloud itself. And then when you're ready, you can go live. Or if you want to go live right now, you can go live and you just put your domain details in, set up the DNS and so on on your registrar and you are good to go in a matter of minutes. Let's leave this on the demo site. You can see you can give this a name if you want to. We'll just leave that as it is, will everything else as it is as well, and we simply come down and click on next and that will then go through the process of setting it all up. No messing around with Docker or any kind of CLI commands or anything like that. Or can you head around how to set this up yourself? It's basically going to go and do it all for us. It is that simple. There you go. After a few moments, everything is set up for us. You can see there's our domain, any options for that domain down the left hand side. And when you want to go live, like I said, you can set this up to go live, no problem at all. You can come into N8N if you want to, you can come into your environment. Any updates that are available can all be handled directly inside your xCloud account. There we go. After a few moments. Now everything is set up, updated and we are ready to create our account. So now we can go through, fill out the relevant information for our name, email, password and so on. You'll then get an email with a serial number and so on. So you can just input that as the instructions tell you to do. I'm going to have already got this already set up. Then once you log in, you've got everything set up and configured. You now have access to N8N. We have full access. We can create our workflows from here. We can create anything we want instead of our credentials executions. We can use templates. As you can see, there are over 2000 templates like I showed you earlier. So there's a ton of options to help you get started. And when we're ready, we can start from scratch. And we now have the full visual editor inside here. So again, simply come in, choose what you want to happen. So we'll say for example WordPress. Then we've got a bunch of different options to create posts, get posts and so on pages, user actions. There's tons of options here or things like RSS feeds, no problem. You can see those options are there and there are just tons and tons and tons of integrations inside your. You can see there's loads. If we get rid of this, we got trigger manually on webhooks on form submissions when executed by another flow chat messages. There's tons of options here. But now you have a server set up with minimal effort, no technical knowledge required to kind of get this started. And now you can start using this, testing it, learning how it all works and so on. So xcloud makes this super quick and easy. And like I say, once I start to get to grips with this, I'll create a couple of videos to kind of help you get started. But in the meantime, I would highly recommend you check out Brendan o' Connell's channel. He's got quite a few videos on using N8N. He's kind of his preferred automation tool. Check his channel out, link in the description down below. Give him some love. Go and check out the videos N810 and kind of see how this all works. But that's what I want to cover in this video for now. If you want to learn more about Xcloud, you can check out this video all the ClickUp links in the description. My name is Paul C. This is WP Tuts and until next time, take care.