xCloud Control Panel for VPS and WordPress Sites

Hi, this is David McCam for WebTNG. In this video I'm looking at xCloud. XCloud is a new hosted control panel for managing virtual private servers. It's been developed by the WP developer team and the founder of WP Managed Ninja is also a partner. They've just launched the service. And in this video I want to do an overview and walkthrough. In the walkthrough, I want to add a VPs to xCloud and then I want to add a WordPress website. So I think this will give people an idea of what the control panel looks like and the kind of features it has.

To use xCloud, this control panel, you're going to need a virtual private server and they have an automated installs for.

Vultr, Google cloud platform and DigitalOcean.

You can also bring your own virtual private server from some other provider and then they have a script you can run. And so it's a little bit of a manual option and that's actually what.

I'm going to try.

So if you want to use one of these three, then that would probably be a little bit easier to set up. You can see down here they have their pricing plan. Now, another option besides getting the virtual private server yourself, setting up the account yourself and then bringing the credentials over to xCloud is they also have a service where they will provide the virtual private server. Okay. And so that's what this option is here. When it's the xCloud managed server, then the other option is that you manage your own server. This would be the regular subscription pricing that they have.

Okay.

They do have a free trial and I understand that you can start with a free trial and then upgrade to the lifetime deal. So that might be something to ask about if you're interested in the free trial. And then these are the costs per month and then the price per server goes down here as you have more servers, then they also have a lifetime deal. I guess this is for limited time. So to be able to manage two servers is $99, up to seven is 299, up to 15 is 599 and up to 50 is 999 and,999. You know, they do have servers in different locations. And then here are some of the highlights of their service. Have full access. It comes with Redis caching built in the xCloud stack. Their install and script is installing Linux, Nginx, PHP and MySQL and Redis. They're going to keep those up to date for you, you're going to bring a virtual private server. The virtual private server needs to be a recent version of Ubuntu. They do have some utilities and things for server and site migration. Not going to use those. And another kind of cool thing is that you can have a team associated with your account. So that's nice. I think that's a higher tier feature.

Over at Run Cloud.

Here we talked about migration. That's the overview here. Here's a link to the documentation. You know, this just launched like two days ago. They've got pretty good docs for being brand new. Having said that, this is an area, you know, server management, you setting up a control panel for a VPS and whatnot. This is a place where you will want good documentation. They do have a chat help here and if you click the help button, it opens an email. So I don't think they have ticketed support yet. Could be wrong, but I didn't see ticketed support yet. Okay, so here's the faq, here's some.

Troubleshooting help and things like that.

Okay, so I've logged in here, I've already paid, you know, and it's saying, hey, you start out, let's add a server.

Makes sense.

Here's a link for all servers. Here's a link for sites, here's a search, here's a place for notices, here's news. Here is where you go see the profile, the team settings, the billing, payment documentation.

And you can have light and dark mode.

Okay, let's go to profile here first. So your contact information now for security, you can change the password. You have the option, I think for two factor authentication. And I think you can kill off all of your browser sessions here to have a logout from everything. Team management, you can add team members. This is where you would add your SSH key. These are the integrations. Your service provider, they have integration with Cloudflare. So that's built in here, which is nice for people who want to take advantage of Cloudflare. You can set up storage provider here. I think they just have one option now, maybe aws, but they're going to add more. And you have an option for email provider. You know, if you have shared hosting, a lot of times that comes with an email account. Generally a lot of agencies really recommend that you use something like Microsoft or Google Mail or Zoho Mail or something like that rather than trying to host it yourself because that can be a pain. However, you know, your websites need to send emails. You, you have transactional emails when you know someone submits your contact form or maybe you get notified if there's an error on your site or other events like that. And so they have this option here to set up the email provider. They recommend mailgun or sendgrid as kind of good ones if you're going to be having a high volume. But they also offer their own service here. And so what they're doing is they're giving the option for a thousand transactional emails for a dollar a month, which is really cheap. You know, you can update that. Of course, if you're going to send more email.

It depends on how many servers and.

Users and things you have. But that's nice kind of.

It's going to take a little while so I'll pause the video and resume it when this finishes. Awesome. Server provision successfully.

Woohoo.

As they say in the movies, we're in.

Okay, so let's look around now, our dashboard. Now that we have a server showing our IP address, the provider, the plan saying budget self managed doesn't really appeal to me. It should just say self managed I think then we have our MySQL version RAM on the server, the server operating system disk usage. So that's looking good. Let's just look at these actions Here we can view sites, add sites, restart server, restart nginx, restart MySQL archive server and delete server. Here we have database so we don't have one added yet. We've got sudo users so we would add one here.

I think you can do one for each site.

We're going to install the sites Next we have monitoring tab. Okay, nothing much yet because we haven't really started logs so we don't have a log yet I guess error log. All right, so I'll have to keep an eye on that events PHP settings. Okay, so this looks pretty good. We might need to tweak this. The memory limit might want to go up and the max file upload size perhaps. I'm pretty sure we probably want to bump that up. Server management so we can restart the services server name, we can change the name, but this isn't editable here. Okay. And settings. So I think I'm going to have to go to the server control panel to change the time zone do that. I think it'll require the server to reboot so I won't do it right now. And now let's add our new site. We have our option to install a new site, clone a git repo, migrate an existing site, manually upload a WordPress site upload a zip file. So be interesting what format that would need to be in. Or we can migrate a full server. So let's install a new website. Okay. And the site title is going to be WP Site demos. I guess we'll call it production. So we can go live or go to a staging environment. Our domain name is wpsitedemos.com and I think we would perhaps use this if we were going to add www or subdomain. Maybe now we can add DNS and SSL certificate on cloudflare if we want. So I have that set up already. Do I want to enable ssh? Yes. Let's view my DNS to see what that says. Awesome. Okay, and now this may be the full page. And read this caching. So it's going to be interesting. I'll leave it on for now, but it's good to keep in mind that you have this caching going if during development you start to see some odd behavior. And right now it's set up to use this free 100 emails a month. I'll leave that on for now. I can change it later.

Then.

It's got admin, username, password, email address, WordPress, latest version php version site owner that's the owner at the Ubuntu OS level.

Having a separate user per site is a good practice.

We can have a deploy script. This is interesting. Server showing our IP address the provider the plan saying budget self managed doesn't really appeal to me. It should just say self managed I think then we have our MySQL version RAM on the server, the server operating system disk usage so that's looking good. Just look at these actions here. We can view sites, add sites, restart server, restart nginx, restart MySQL archive server and delete server. Here we have database so we don't have one added yet. We've got sudo users so we would add one here.

I think you can do one for each site. We're going to install the sites.

Next we have monitoring tab. Okay, nothing much yet because we haven't really started logs. So we don't have a log yet. I guess error log. All right, so I'll have to keep an eye on that. Events PHP settings Okay, so this looks pretty good. We might need to tweak this. The memory limit might want to go up and the max file upload size perhaps. I'm pretty sure we probably want to bump that up. Server management so we can restart the services Server name We can change the name, but this isn't editable here. Okay. And settings. So I think I'm going to have to go to the server control panel to change the time zone. Do that. I think it'll require the server to reboot, so I won't do it right now. And now let's add our new site. We have 3, 100 emails a month and I'll leave that on for now. I can change it later. Then it's got admin, username, password, email address, WordPress, latest version php version, site owner, that's the owner at the Ubuntu OS level.

Has having a separate user per site.

Is a good practice. We can have a deploy script. This is interesting. Might be a useful feature. Create the database or add your own. And we have the database name, the database user and the database password. So I tweak the user credentials there. And now I'm going to. Next. Okay, it's saying it's doing the setup. So it's set up. Okay, this is nice. We can toggle this off if we need to. Here we have backup. It's going to show, I guess if there are updates available. Here we have the primary domain. We can add domain. We can view cloudflare integration. We have our logs. We have up here they wanted a site user. And then we have the domain, the SSL certificate updates. Let's go to backups, previous backups, backup settings. So select bucket. We would need to add a storage provider. Okay, so we don't have that. So we're not going to have any remote backups. Local backup settings. Okay, so this will I guess do a backup to the server. I'm going to use Blog Vault, so I'm not going to get into this right now, but it's good for people to know that. This is here monitoring redirection. Okay, so I'm wondering if these are going to add the rules to nginx or something. If so, that would probably be faster than doing it inside of WordPress. Here's where we can tweak the email provider.

I'm guessing this is a WP config editor.

Here we have access details, caching logs, events and settings. So let's look at settings. We can change the PHP version, can edit the site tags, we can disable NGINX file regeneration. We can turn on PHP execution in the upload directories and we can enable XML rpc. Those are turned off by default, so that's good security. You can edit the X frame options. I think that's for directives given to the Browser by default, xCloud Cron is on. You can manage the cron here. And then we can turn on basic authentication or we can delete the site. All right, so that's our site overview. Now we have a magic login here to go into the site. This is interesting because I thought I.

Filled it all out.

So it was going to fill this in, but maybe those settings were not on the WordPress level. So let's fill this in. I'll add username and password and my email. And for right now, I'll discourage search engines and we'll install WordPress. Okay, so we're in now to the WordPress admin.

So that was pretty straightforward.

And now we have a site that's the setup walkthrough. Now, let's conclude with a bit of discussion.

I want to start out by saying that I was impressed by the depth and polish of xCloud at launch. So there are some rough spots that I noticed that I'm going to talk about, but. But I don't want those to detract from what I think is a really good achievement. First impression, first release. So here are the things that I think could use some attention. First, when we look at the homepage and at the server setup options as well, we see that it was possible to provision your VPs through xCloud. Now, presumably that is the managed option. Then there's the option to sign up for Digital Ocean Vultr and the Google cloud platform through xCloud. And finally there's the option to bring your own VPS. Now, there isn't much information on these three options on the home page. For example, what's included in the managed option. And I think clarity is needed so that users can better compare convenience and pricing options. And, and that's probably a missed sales opportunity for xCloud because they're not communicating their value. Speaking of options and value, let's take a look at the pricing. I'm going to compare with RunCloud because that's what I'm familiar with. Of course, RunCloud has been around for a long time, so it's more mature, but I'm just kind of looking at basic features and price. Now, I want to point out that there's not a one to one comparison because the tiers are based a little bit differently. For example, Run Cloud, you have different features in the higher tiers than you have in the basic tier. Whereas with xCloud we've been told the only difference between the tiers is the number of servers with that in mind, let's just look at some pricing here. The Run Cloud basic plan is for one server, $80.04 a year.

Okay.

The annual pricing starter plan for xCloud is two to five servers for $60 a year. So just based on that kind of simple comparison, the starter plan annual pricing looks pretty good. If we jump down to the xCloud Launch Ltd pricing, the entry package is two servers for $99 for for lifetime. And that is also a great deal. You break even in just a little more than a year. In relation to the Run Cloud basic plan, if we look at the Run Cloud Pro plan, it's $150 a year for unlimited servers. So the xCloud annual pricing professional 6 to 10 servers is $48 a year per server. So that works out to $480 a year for 10 servers. So I have a harder time seeing the value of that. If we go down to the Launch LTD pricing, the budget package seven servers for 299, that's twice the price of the annual Pro Run Cloud package. So that also seems like a good deal to me. And that's the package I got. If we go then to the xCloud annual pricing for agency 11/plus servers at $36 a year or $720 a year for 20 servers. So that also doesn't seem like quite as good a deal. Now maybe over time xcloud will add more features that will be included in these packages. And so then that would be a different calculation. If we drop down to the xCloud Launch Ltd pricing, the growth package 15 servers for 599, that's four times the annual pro package at RunCloud. So we're kind of stretching the value there. And then if we look at the performance for 50 servers for 999 and supreme 250 servers for 1,999, that's even harder to appreciate. So for me, the sweet spot for Xcloud annual pricing is a starter. If you have five or fewer servers, it's a good deal. And for the LTD pricing, the sweet spot was the entry or budget and maybe the growth package. That's kind of my look at the pricing there. I didn't compare the managed or the provisioning of the VPS from xCloud and compare pricing with the DigitalOcean and the other VPS providers. So those are different calculations that people who are interested in that will need to make. The next area, which I thought was important is security and firewall. I noticed in the xCloud docs there's a mention of fail to ban to help counter brute force attacks, and I also saw a mention of a Linux firewall. It's possible those are roadmap items because I don't see any interface for them in the Dashboard ui. I think security is important and hopefully security is one of the first missing pieces or rough spots that can be added quickly. Finally we have the importance of support and a track record. I didn't see any mention of the level of support being offered. Presumably xCloud isn't going to help you if you have a plugin conflict or something like that. I would guess that their support is going to help you with installation issues and with issues that might be related to the configuration of the services in their stack and things you might see in the PHP and NGINX logs. But it would be good to have that spelled out so that people can set their expectations in terms of support. I think a top priority for the xCloud team should be establishing a reputation for stellar support. That'll be something that will really make or break a platform like this. As I said in the beginning of this discussion, xCloud is remarkably full featured and well polished being that we're in the first few days. So kudos to the WP developer and xCloud teams for a great launch. So that's my walkthrough first look at xCloud. I hope you found this of value. There is a text summary available on the WebTNG website along with other walkthroughs, reviews and resources. If you like the video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel. Thank you for watching.