My Honest xCloud Review After Months of Use!

Now, I'm not one for doing reviews on products, but today I want to talk about xCloud and kind of give my thoughts on this after using it for probably the last eight to 10 months. Now, if you don't know what xCloud is, if you've ever used a service like Cloudways, for example, you'll know that the Cloudways interface kind of sits in between you, the user, and the cloud platform you choose, like DigitalOcean, Vultr, Amazon, S3 and so on. Well, Xcloud is fundamentally the same kind of thing. The main key difference here is that you buy into the xCloud platform and then you can connect at whatever cloud servers you want based upon however many servers you're paying for. Now, I grabbed this on a lifetime deal when it first came out, and I wanted to let it mature before I talked too much about it. Well, like I say, I've been using this now for probably the last eight to 10 months. I've moved all my sites from a platform like cloudways over to xCloud. Not that I thought Cloudways was bad in any way, but I like the fact this is all kind of control and I have access to and control all this side of things. So let me show you some of the features, why I like this, and then kind of give you my feedback at the end. Why? Personally, I really do like what xCloud are doing here. Now, before we do go and take a look at the dashboard, let's take a quick look at the pricing structure for xCloud. Now, with xCloud, what you're doing is you're basically paying for xCloud itself, unless you grab the lifetime deal. You can use this then, and you can use it to connect up via xCloud itself to places like Vultr and so on, or you can manage your own service completely. So you can see if we use the xCloud managed service. So this is very akin to what you'd have. By using something like Cloudways, you've got the same kind of thing here. You can specify what kind of server setup you want, and then it'll give you some prices based upon that, and that'll be managed inside xCloud itself. Whereas the own server, which is what I've got, this is where you buy the server and then you can kind of control what you want and you connect it up as you want to inside your dashboard. It's very simple. And as you can see, you can try this out for absolutely zero cost with one server set up through xCloud, you can run 10 sites on that server. There's no credit card required. So if you were interested in this, after I've actually gone through things, I would recommend you check out the free plan. There's no obligation. You can test it, try it, if you like it, cool. If you don't, no problems at all. And then based upon what you want, whether starter, professional, agency, which kind of changes the prices and the price goes down per server based upon the number of servers that you purchase. So you can see one to five servers will cost you $5 per month per server, down to $3 per server if you have 11 plus. And you can then control the number of sites on there and just consider a server a connection to something like Vultr or Cloudways or Amazon S3, any of those kinds of things. That's your server. And then your sites will sit on that. You'll control that inside your xCloud account. So let me show you how this works. So this is my current dashboard. And as you can see, I currently have one active server, a total of nine sites that sit on that server. And I'm currently on the starter plan and I've got no vulnerable sites. So if we take a look underneath, you'll see this will then show you the number of sites that I've got. So then we have two kinds of setups here inside our server, we've got production sites and we've got demo sites. The key difference here is a production site is a site that is live on a live domain, like for example learnbricksbuilder.com the demo sites are sites on temporary domains that are created as part of your xCloud account. They're still accessible on the front end. They're just not connected up to a proper live domain. So you can see, for example the N8N test I've got here. This is a test setup on a demo. The same thing for the WPTATS community, which is testing out Fluent community. Again, you can see this is on a demo setup, but I've got full access on the front end to use this as I see fit. Three key difference here between the two. If we take a look at the servers, then you can see there's my server gives me the information about it. This is set up using Vultr and it's a test server that I set up originally to kind of get a feel for it. So it's quite a low performance setup. But as you can see, I've got nine sites on here. Everything's Running smoothly. I will be upgrading this in the next couple of days to a higher tier with more RAM and so on. But it's a good indication of what this is like to work with using something like a low tier server setup with Vultr, for example. In this case, this is costing me about 16, $17 per month. And that's including the backup facility that you have as part of Vultr, which you can pay for separately. If you want to add a new site, it is as simple as clicking on add new site. That will then allow you to create a WordPress site. And when I originally bought into the lifetime deal for this, WordPress was the only supported platform on here. Transitioning and sort of migrating the sites over from existing setups like Cloudways and so on was pretty painless. It's all pretty simple and straightforward and you can actually migrate entire servers over, so you don't have to just migrate just an individual site. You can clone git repositories, you can manually upload sites, you can migrate the full server, or you can recreate a site from a backup. So that's pretty cool. Like I said, that's what was fundamentally being used for. To start off with, they introduced custom PHP apps a little later. So again, clone that git repository, manually upload a website. These are PHP websites, they can be static sites. You don't have to have WordPress. Then very recent, they've introduced Laravel and over the last sort of week or two they've set up the one click install. So we can now install phpmyadmin if you want to use that for your database management. Uptime Kuma. So if you want uptime monitoring on your sites. And the nice thing with this is these are basically standalone setups. So the same thing goes with N8N. If you want to check a video out on how to get that set up and running, you can check that out here. But we can literally just click once, fill out the relevant details, specify whether we want this on a live site or whether we want to have this on a date, sort of domain a demo site like we've seen, fill out the relevant details and within a matter of a couple of minutes your site is spun up on the particular server you've got set up and you are basically up and running and off to the races. It's very, very simple. If you want to, you can set this up and white label it. Now, depending upon what you have, whether you sort of buy into this now, there is a cost incurred to this. It's not particularly high, I don't believe. But if you want to white label this, so you want to resell those services and have it not branded as xCloud so you can brand it yourself, you could absolutely do that. So if you want to run this as a sort of hosting, sort of sideline, a side hustle kind of thing, you can do that from here, which again is pretty nifty. I haven't tried it myself, I have no real need for this right now, but it's cool to see that they introduced this. Now, jumping back into the dashboard, let's take a look at the sites we have and the options we have available. Let's take a look at this demo site for the community. Let's click the three dots and you can see we've got some options here. Let's just jump straight into the overview and inside Julie. Now you can see we get an overview of all the configuration options, what we can enable and disable. There's a bunch of options on the left hand side which we'll take a look at. First of all you can see at the top, it tells us the IP address, what we're running, the PHP version, all those kinds of good things. Then we've got information about the domain. So you can see currently we're using the temporary demo domain, but once you're ready to go live, you can simply just hit this to edit it, create it, set it up, add your DNS records via your sort of registrar and you're off to the races pretty quickly. Add additional domains if you want to, so on subdomains and things like that. Cloudflare integration, you can do that directly inside here as well. Again, it's all pretty simple and painless. Then we've got control over our caching our SSL certificate, which again is completely free. If you want to use external services, you can do set of basic authorization backups and so on and find out if there are any updates available. And again, if you come in, you can view your details. So for example, we come into our backups, we can set that we wanted to set up remote backups to send us off server, where we want to send them, any kind of sort of what you want to do once you exclude and so on. Or if you want to create local backups which will store this on your account inside xCloud, you could do that here as well. So it's up to you how you want to handle those backups. Again, pretty simple previous backups. This will show you any backups you currently have now I've got nothing set up on you, but you can set up the frequency and so on. And I've used this a couple of times. I've had a few issues and to be honest, it's been absolutely simple and painless. Don't always rely upon just your hosting platform to handle that. Always have three levels of redundancy when it comes to backups. Created a video on this in the past, check it out, link in the description, but your backups are here. It's simple, it's painless and it's really quick and easy to set up. Come to something like your page caching for example and we can set up our caching so you can see we've got fastcgi with nginx. Depending upon if you're a Lightspeed Server or nginx you'll have different options, but you've got Wrocket WS Super Cache, total cache and so on. But you can set up whether you want to use Redis Object caching, Object Cache Pro cloudflare Edge cache is all integrated into you and simple to set up. All pretty simple. You can purge your cache from inside here. So if you see in kind of weird things happening and come in, disable it. When you're working on a live site, purge your cache. You get the idea. All things you're probably used to. You've got email configuration, so you can use a sort of free limited resource on you with the Excel 300 emails. There are limitations to this, but if you want to connect this up to an external email provider, you can absolutely do that inside your dashboard as well. And if you want to expand this out and use something else, take advantage. For example, the same managed email service, you can do that. You can increase your sort of resources available there as well. Site monitoring, we've got monitoring options inside here. So you can see this will check out any CPU spikes, RAM usage, disk usage and so on. So this is pretty minimal because the site isn't live, it's a test setup site and so on. You can find out any DNS status and SSL and so on. You can check out your logs on here, check out any events, and as you obviously have a live site, you're making updates and changes and all those kinds of things. Obviously all these logs are going to expand. This is like I say, a demo site. Any access data. So if you want to access your site via SSH or sftp, you can do that. You've got your file manager and database management inside you. So for example if you come into database, you can enable phpmyadmin or you can use Adminer. You've got the same thing for file manager. There's security here, so you can enable this while you want to work on it, then disable it for security purposes so you don't have any issues there. Always good. Speaking of security, there is nginx Security, Customization, Authorization, Authentication, two Factor authentication. All those kinds of things are here. You've even got the 7G firewall setup and I believe AG firewall has also been added in. Every site on here is container. So if something happens to one of your sites, it's not going to affect all of your other sites. So they're kind of siloed, which is always a good thing from a security point of view. You don't want one of your sites being compromised because of a insecure password or something, or a plugin that's caused a problem to affect all of the sites on your server because these are containers, that sort of mitigates that issue. One of the things I really do like about using xCloud though, is we also have staging sites built directly into the platform. Once you take your site live, this doesn't. You don't have this access available on the demo sites because it's a demo. But once you go live, you'll see when you come into any of your sites, any of your production sites, you have deploy staging, you can click, go through again. You can use a test domain or a custom domain if you want to, up to you here and handle it. And then you can hit deploy staging site. Takes a few moments, but then you have an identical duplicate of your site all set up. So if you want to run updates before you push those to a live site, you can absolutely do that here. So you can test it out, make sure those things are working. So it's great to have a stage insight built directly into your cloud platform as well. Finally, there's also the options then to handle your php, your cron and so on. So you can set up and you can configure and tweak all these options inside js you can see you can tweak your PHP set settings if you need to, especially if you're running particular plugins that require specific settings. You can handle that inside here you've also got your cron job. So you can set this up to use WP cron or your xCloud cron if you want to, the frequency and so on. You've got site tags, you can switch on debug mode, so you don't have to mess about the code inside WordPress itself, you can handle that directly inside your xCloud platform, your rescue site. So you go repair site user update, directory permissions and so on. If you've got issues with your PHP nginx configuration and so on, you can run that here and you can also disable the site. So if you set a site up and then you sort of migrate this over to a live site, for example, you want to keep that demo site or things like that, you can disable the site from the front end and it'll still sit inside your xCloud dashboard. And then if you want to reinstate it, you can just do that again. This is great. If you're having client sites on here and they haven't paid you, or for whatever reason, you can disable this site without deleting their site. So nifty little features. But when you do want to delete a site, you can do that from inside your as well. And you can handle various other things. Now, finally, if you want to add another server to your setup, it's very, very simple. And you can just click on Add new server, then you can choose what server you want to use. So you can see all the supported ones are available inside Joan, We've got Vultr, you've got Google Cloud, AWS, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, and any other sort of freshly installed Ubuntu server. So you can do that from here as well. The cool thing is, if you do have the lifetime deal, you get a slight discount if you want to work with Vultr. So you can see it drops the price down a little bit. So let's just say we're interested in this. We can click on it and then we can choose exactly what we want. So whether it's a general server, a premium server, you can choose then which one you want. You can simply come down, choose the region you want. So, for example, in Europe and say, London, you can choose what version of Ubuntu you want. So if you want the latest build there, we've got that. We can select the database we want in this example, MySQL or MariaDB, and you can choose whether you want NGINX or Open Lightspeed. And then you can set up whether you want to have backups enabled. And there's your pricing. Once you're happy, click on Next. It'll go through the process of setting things up. You may have a couple of little configuration things you need to do, but it's all handled inside xcloud painlessly with full instructions and help. Speaking of help, there's been a couple of times in which I've had to reach out to the help and support for various different things, sometimes with technical things, sometimes with just questions to do with the platform itself. And every single time they've come back and been incredibly helpful and very, very quick. So from my point of view, whenever you have any kind of hosting, there's going to be a time, no matter how technically advanced you are, there's going to be a time where you're going to need that support. And I think having good quality, fast support is always, always, always a big, big bonus. I've had examples in the past where I've had hosting companies based in the US, even though they fronted in the UK, and it would take sometimes up to 48 hours to get a reply. And imagine having a conversation where you've got to wait 24 to 48 hours for every single response. That becomes painful. So help and support is always very, very important. Never overlook that. But basically that's my kind of overview on xCloud. For me personally, I found the experience to be getting better each sort of month, each time I sort of use it, each new feature they bring on board, they listen to the community around the platform and take on board what people are asking for and implement it where it makes sense. They don't just sort of bundle tons and tons of stuff in there because it sounds cool. All the features I've seen in there actually are useful, and I can see myself using various different ones for various different reasons. But xCloud for me has been a really solid platform. Is it perfect? No. There's obviously room for improvement. It's still a relatively new platform, and compared to some of its peers, it may be lacking a few things. But like I said, they've been very quick on implementing suggestions that make sense and updating various different features. And that's why I've held off so long before I've even talked about xCloud. But if you've used xCloud yourself, what has been your experience? Let me know in the comment section down below. And if you haven't, would you consider using something like xcloud again? Let me have your comments down below. No affiliation. This is just something I paid for and I've been using myself and I still use every single day. So, with that being said, all applicable links in the description down below. My name is Paul C. This is WP Tuts and until next time, take care.