This New Hosting Saves 50% of My Money (How to Migrate to xCloud)

What is the cheapest WordPress hosting? Well, if you have been trying to find the best fast and cheap Web hosting for WordPress, you probably have heard names like Hostinger, Bluehost or Siteground. These are well established brands and they have been around for years and a lot of people, especially WordPress users, have been using these services to build a website. However, there is quite a problem with their pricing. A lot of them are not being candid when it comes to the actual price of the hosting itself. Take for example Bluehost. But their cheapest plan is only less than $3 a month, which is quite a good deal. But if you look closely, the actual price was $12 a month after the first year. So essentially they give you an introductory pricing at the beginning, but later they're going to jack up the price so you have to pay extra for essentially the same service. And it's almost like triangle of expectation. There is a good, fast and cheap, but you can only choose two. And for a long time I thought that Cloudways, which is the hosting that I was using, was the perfect balance because it is really good, it's really fast, but it's still reasonable when it comes to pricing. But now I have found something that's just even cheaper than Cloudways and it's called xCloud. So in this video I'm going to show you how you can create a server on xCloud, how to migrate your WordPress from any hosting to xCloud, and I'm going to tell you a lot of things about xCloud, but especially my first impressions after using xCloud for more than two weeks. So let's get into it. Okay, the first thing you need to do is you have to visit xCloud. You can use the link in the video description to get access to it. And maybe before we start, I want to let you know that xCloud was built by people behind WP Ninja and Redeps, and also they have partnership with Google Cloud, DigitalOcean folder and many others. Essentially these people know what they are doing and they are quite a credible entity in the WordPress community. Anyway, you can click Join Free or you can also log in if you already have an account. I'm going to log into my account and after that I'm going to visit servers. These are the servers that I've created before. But for this video I'm going to demonstrate how you can create a server and then how you can migrate a WordPress website to xCloud. But it is important to know that xCloud is paid in advance, meaning that you have to provide your payment info to get access or to get the ability to add server in xCloud. After you added a debit or credit card to your account, then you should be able to create a new server. Right now that's the only way we can pay xCloud. They are planning to add more payment options in the future anyway. After you have added your payment details, you can click Add a new Server and then Here there are two types of servers in xCloud. Basically for this option you can bring your own server that you might have from Vulture, DigitalOcean or Google Cloud and then you could use xCloud to essentially manage those servers. But for this video we are going to be using the server that is provided by xCloud. And that's why I'm going to select this option. Click Xcloud Manage. Now for the server name, it's pretty clear you have to name the server. I'm going to call this one Subpixel Server and the server tag is just hacking. It's just for managing. This is completely optional. And then there are two types of server in xCloud. The difference between General and Premium is not only at the pricing, but actually the hardware that is being used on the server. Premium is slightly more expensive because it is using a more powerful CPU and instead of using regular SSD it is using an NVME SSD which is faster. You could use Premium if you are planning to build or migrate a website with a big amount of traffic. But for a medium or small site you could use the General server. Please keep in mind that you cannot just move to Premium or if you're using Premium, you want to go back to General. This is something that you have to decide right from the get go. So there is also a server size, there is a Newcomer Basic. This is just the specific specification of the hardware. You could use a bigger storage or bigger RAM or much higher bandwidth if you want to. But for this demonstration I'm going to select Newcomer, which only cost me $5 a month. Just to give you an idea, the same type of server on Cloudways is going to set me back $11 a month. So right from the get go we can see that this is significantly cheaper than even Cloudways, which I think was among the cheapest. After that I'm going to select the region for the server. This is very important. You want to select server that is very close, located exactly where your target audience really are. So if you have a visitor from let's say Europe. Then you might want to select a server from Europe. You can select Amsterdam, German or France. If you have a visitor from Asia, you might want to select Japan or Singapore. I think you get the idea. So I'm going to select New Jersey. And for the database Type, there's only one option. At the moment there is only MySQL 8.0. And for the recommended option we have an option to enable an automatic Xcloud backup. It only costs $1 month, so I think it is no brainer to have this enabled. But do keep in mind that if you're using the Premium server, the price is going to be $2, so it's slightly more expensive. But then again, that's the price of a Premium server. Anyway, let's move on to the next step. This one we have to select Web server. So in xCloud there are two web servers. There is nginx. There is also Open Lightspeed. Without going too much into technical. They are both essentially the same. But Open Lightspeed is relatively and one advantage that it has is you could use the Quick Cloud CDN for free if you're using OpenLiteSpeed. But NGINX is a more established web server and you don't have to worry about compatibility because both NGINX and OpenLite speed are compatible with WordPress just fine. You don't have to worry about that. But you might want to ask your current hosting provider about the web server that they are using. It is best to match the web server that you're currently using to xCloud. Next, we can see that this server is going to cost me $6 a month, $5 for the server and $1 for the automatic backup. Let's click next to start creating the server. Now it started creating a server. If you see this error, this has nothing to do with xCloud. This has something to do with my bank account. So essentially my local bank account doesn't allow an automated payment like this. So I have to authorize the payment manually. I don't think this problem is going to affect a lot of people, but in case you do, you want to check out your bill list and check the invoice and then you have to authorize the payment manually. So I'll be back. All right, I have successfully paid the invoice, so I'm going to try again and hopefully this time it's going to go through. So this process is going to take between five to 15 minutes and I think this is the best opportunity to say a few Things about Xcloud and let's say when it comes to interface, xCloud is pretty similar to Cloudways. So anyone that's coming from a cloud hosting like Cloudways or similar to Cloudways shouldn't have a problem navigating around xCloud. And also a few things that I like from Xcloud is that there is an monitoring for each website in case your server experience a heavy load time and you don't know which one or which website is causing the problem. You can always check out the monitoring page and you'll see what website is using the most CPU or the most RAM from your server. This is a valuable information to speed up the process of resolving problem that might come on the server. But you might be asking how about support? Why not just asking a customer service agent to help you fixing the website or fixing the server? Yes you could. There is a chat feature that allows you to contact a customer service agent immediately right from your panel. And maybe one thing that I really like is that you don't have to click on the chat window and then you have to navigate to the specific department. This is quite unorthodox because in a lot of web hosting providers they're going to ask you a lot of questions before you can meet with the customer agent. They're going to ask you what's the problem, what's the category of the problem, how long it's been affected. You Is this the first time? I mean there are too many surfaces, but on Xcloud it's almost like there is someone you can talk right away. So if something goes wrong, I think this process is going to take quite some time. So through the magic of editing you'll see what happens when it's done. Alright, the server has been created and we are ready to start migrating our website to xCloud. This is the WordPress website that I want to migrate and there are many methods you can try to migrate a website to xCloud. But the one method that I highly recommend is by using a staging website. Essentially we are going to create a staging website or a demo website and then using a migrate guru plugin, we are going to transfer all the data from the original website to the destination website on xCloud. Click Site List here on your new server and then Click Install new WordPress website. And then here you want to select demo site. This is essentially a staging website that we are going to create first and then we want to populate it with content from the original website later. Let's give it a name and then I'm going to scroll down. You can enable Multistite if you want to, but this is a website that doesn't have a multisite capability, so I'm not going to enable it. And also you want to enable caching on your website later. This is an email provider configuration. You can enable or disable it. But Xcloud offers up to 100 free transactional emails for your server. But I'm not going to use this service, so I'm going to disable it. Blueprint is almost like a template. You can, you could enable this if you want to get certain plugins enabled or installed on your website. But I'm not going to use this. By the way, you can always customize the blueprint for your website. This is very useful if you are building a lot of websites for your clients and you can set up what themes or plugins that would be installed every time you create a new WordPress website on xCloud. But of course I'm not going to use this, so I'm going to disable this option. So just review all the options. This is basically the basic setting of it. And let's click click Next. This will create a site that later we are going to populate. Just wait until it finished. Okay, the staging website has been created. Now you can click Magic Login to login to the dashboard of this staging website and we are going to install a plugin called Migrate Guru. So go to plugin and click Add new plugin. Find Migrate Guru and later you can install and activate the plugin. This is the plugin that we need to install. Go click Install now and then click Activate. All right, now go to Migration key. We want to open this menu and click Copy key. This is very important. We want to get this key of this website. Now I'm going to close this website and I'm going to open new tab. I'm going to visit the original website on the original website. Go to plugins and click Add new plugin. We want to install the Migrate Guru plugin as well. So click Migrate Guru and we want to install and activate this plugin on our your original website. Click Activate. Now type in your email address. This is just a communication email. If something goes wrong, then everything will be communicated through this email. So just type your active email and then click I agree to blog post terms and conditions and click Migrate. Now click Other hosts and you just need to paste the migration key that you have copied on the staging website. Right click and click click Paste. This is the key and let's click Migrate to start the migration process. This process would take anywhere between 10 to 30 minutes, but for a small website it's usually very quick, maybe even faster than five minutes. With that being said, it's still always a good idea to migrate your website during off peak hours because some of the resources of your server is going to be used for migration and you don't want to slow down your website for your visitors. So just wait until it finishes and we are going to move on to the next step. All right, now the site has been fully migrated to xCloud. I'm going to close this migration window and we are going back to this dashboard, this site, this staging website on xCloud. Now what you need to do is you have to change the domain name because it's still using this staging name. We want to use the real domain of the website. So click Domain and click Go Live. Select Go Live and you want to type the domain name of your website. And you can also add some additional domains if you want to. And here there is an option to add DNS and SSL certificate on cloudflare. So if you are using Cloudflare, which I believe a lot of you are, then you might want to enable this option. But before you can do that, you have to integrate your Cloudflare account to xcloud. Don't worry, the process is pretty simple. It is just copy and paste the token key from your Cloudflare to xcloud and I'll show you the guide on the screen and also you can see the documentation of on the xCloud website. But if you're not using Cloudflare, you might want to add an A record to your DNS setting and then you want to verify your DNS. So since I'm using Cloudflare, I'm going to enable this option. Okay, let's click Save and just wait for about two minutes until the domain propagation is finished. What's happening behind the scene is that xCloud is going to change or point the domain name to the new server. This is happening automatically. So the reason they have an integration between Cloudlet and Xcloud is that when you migrate a server, it's going to happen instantly. There is almost no downtime. They're going to change the IP address from the old server to the new server on xCloud instantly. You can see the status on this menu. As you can see, the domain has been pointed to the xCloud server and do not visit your website right away. It is Highly recommended. To just clear the cache on your website, go to WordPress and then click Caching here. I want to purge the cache. I'm going to click this button. Just wait for a few seconds. It looks good. And you will see that the domain name has changed to the actual name. It is no longer the staging name. This is the real name of the website. You can click Magic Login to login to your new website. Well, not new website. This is the same website as before. It's just now on a completely different server. There are a few adjustments that you need to make after you migrated your website to xCloud. For example, the Breeze plugin, which is the caching plugin from Cloudways, is not necessary. There is also mal care or bot protection. It's not necessary. Migrate Guru, since we are done, we don't need that anymore. And Object Cache Pro, we don't need that because we are going to be using nginx, Helper and Redis Object Cache for our caching plugins. So I'm going to remove or deactivate these plugins and I'm going to enable the two basic plugins that are offered by xCloud and I'm going to enable nginx and I will also enable Redis Object cache. Click Enable Object Cache and there you go. This is the same website as before, but now on a different server. But how about speed? Does xCloud with half the price of Cloudways can be the same or maybe even better than Cloudways? So I actually done some tests on my main website and this is the result on Cloudways. As you can see, the performance score is 81 on the mobile device. On desktop it was not a problem. Everything is perfect. But once I migrated to xCloud this is the score. It is almost perfect from 81 jumps to 98 and the desktop is also the same. So I gotta say, even with little optimization, xCloud is already much faster than Cloudways without the price. So that's something that I really appreciate. But regardless, it is always a good idea to manage your website. You want to make sure that you are running plugins that you actually needed. So if you are interested to minimize the amount of plugins on your WordPress website and make the whole performance way faster, then check out this video and I'll see you there.