xCloud Hosting Review: Good Enough To Switch From Cloudways?

Today I want to talk to you about xCloud hosting and I want to explain to you why I just moved 11 websites from Cloudways over to xCloud. Okay, let's talk about xCloud. So it wasn't that long ago I had never heard of xCloud hosting. Okay. It was never a word that came across my radar. But then I saw an announcement that WP Ninja, the CEO of that, actually invested in this company. He started talking about xCloud and I thought, well, that's a pretty interesting move. And that's a guy that I have a lot of respect for because his company is behind fluentCRM, fluent booking, fluent Forms, several plugins that I use a lot on client sites. And it looks like what he was doing is he's partnering with Startees, which is behind the, the WP developer brand. These are guys behind BetterDocs Templately, which I don't really use very much. Better links, a few plugins like that. So basically this is a team of people that seem to know WordPress pretty well. They were doing this hosting company called xCloud and I took an interest, especially when they, for a limited time launched with a lifetime deal. And I like, that's pretty interesting. It's something that they do pretty frequently. And so I decided to take a look at xCloud. Ultimately we fast forward to today and I have just now switched 11 sites over from Cloudways over to xCloud. And I'm pretty happy with what I'm seeing with xCloud. I wanted to tell you a little bit about it. So what xCloud is is basically a software panel. It's a control panel that sits over top of a virtual private server from the likes of Vultr, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, something like that. And it allows you to manage that server with a really user friendly experience. And so from that perspective you find that xCloud is very similar to something like Cloudways, Run cloud server, avatar, grid pane, something along that line. Now as you'll see down here, and we'll talk about this in a little bit, you can get your server directly through them and we'll talk about that. Or you could totally bring your own from one of their providers, which is, you know, Vultr, like some of the ones I just mentioned. The one that they work with the most is Vultr, which happens to be a provider that I prefer over DigitalOcean myself. Now if you're new to all this, it's important to understand the difference between something like xcloud or Cloudways or some of the ones I just mentioned, and sites like, you know, SiteGround, Bluehost, Hostinger, those types of things. Those types of companies are what I call an all in one, like a commodity web host. Typically you will have a really good intro level price where you pay some small puny amount per month, but you have to kind of enroll for either one up to even as much as three years in advance in order to lock that in. And then after that your price is definitely going to go up. But those companies, you can manage your domains there, you can host your email there. I mean basically everything is in one spot, so it's a very different kind of host. And then you move over to what I call like managed WordPress hosting through the likes of Rocket, who I really, really like and use all the time, WP Engine, Kinsta, things like this. Being that these companies are on the traditional cloud, usually Google Cloud in a lot of cases. What you'll often find are things like limits on the number of sites that you can host, or bandwidth limitations, things like that. And they tend to be more expensive. That's because they're very, very managed. Like they basically really help handhold you through everything, reg hosting and how WordPress works. So then we go over into the world of virtual private servers or VPs, and it's a very different type of hosting, it's a little bit more diy. Okay, but the thing is, you're only limited by the specs of your server. You otherwise have essentially no limits. You can have as many websites as you want. You have a lot more disk storage space typically. And so you can get a lot of horsepower for your money when you use a virtual private server. The thing is, using a virtual private server is a pretty nerdy thing to do and you're pretty much gonna hate life by doing it. So that's where these control panels come in, like xCloud or Cloudways or any of those types of things. It just comes into which one you prefer to use. So when you go with something like xCloud, what you'll find is that you get a lot of the conveniences of managed WordPress hosting, except that you're using a virtual private server. That's a really interesting mix. And there's some real conveniences inside of xCloud that Cloudways does not have. Those are the two that I'm gonna be comparing the most because I have the experience with them and a lot of my people, because they know that I've been using Cloudways for a Long time. A lot of my people are using Cloudways. Okay. And I just want to be clear. There's a lot. There's some shortcomings there, and nextcloud really plugs a lot of those holes and it's done a really good job at doing it. So let's take you behind the scenes here on my xCloud account. I just want to show you the few of the things that I like. I'm not going to go over every little feature here because there's a lot of commonalities with these control panels. But I just want to point out the things that matter the most to me coming from Cloudways. Okay. Just like any VPS control panel, you. You manage your servers. I've only got one active server right now, and then you can manage your websites and you, when you install a site, you decide what server you want to go on. Okay? So that's my VPS server and I've got it hosted with Vultr as a high frequency server. Okay. Now if you pop over to the list of servers, here we go. I've got one for clients now I got some of my own stuff and a few smaller clients on there. You could pop into your database. You can get root access to the server, which is something you're definitely not going to get with Cloudways. You got your logs, of course, you've got your event logs here where you can see everything that's happening on the server and be able to monitor everything, which is quite handy. You've got your PHP settings, which is something you'll have to pop into every now and then. But generally not too much server management, where you can delete the server if you want to, things like that. Other than adjusting a few of the little settings every now and then, you don't typically do a whole lot in here once the thing is set up. And I find that that's the same way with me. But so where you spend a lot of your time is where you're actually managing your actual website and setting them up. And I'm just going to pop into one of them here. Let's pop into happily RV you guys know about this site and show you some of how this actually works. And so you can, when you come in here, you get a lot of the same stuff that you would get in Cloudways. There's a lot of duplicate functionality here of. But one thing I really like is the fact that I can jump right on in to the website. If I hit this button, it will log me in instantly and in fact, let's just do that on screen. It'll log me directly into the back end of that particular site and there it is. I don't have to do anything else. Okay, that is something that's so convenient, but yet Cloudways simply does not have. When you install site on Cloudways, it gives you a link to the control panel along with your username and password, which you then have to copy and paste. And it's just a pain in the ass. And the other thing too is that if you've changed any of that stuff and the Cloudways control panel doesn't even show an accurate login information anymore, so it's just a pain. So the magic login is such a simple feature, but really, really cool. Popping over to your domain settings. This is where you would of course control your domains. If you go live with the site, you would be getting your IP address there and all that. You can control your SSL the same way under the Updates tab. This is where you can actually see what's going on in there. You can see all your plugins that you're using. You can activate or deactivate, same with your themes. This is the kind of thing you would typically only see in a managed WordPress host because it's directly looking at WordPress itself. Again, this is something that Cloudways does not have. At least in the primary version of Cloudways, it doesn't have it. You have to go into WordPress itself to do this type of thing under backup. This is a little bit of a difference is that Cloudways does provide backups and they, they take care of the whole thing. They store those backups as part of their service, but you're definitely paying more for that. With xCloud, you act. You will obviously have local backups, but that's not doing you a whole lot of good. Right? It's on the same server. So what you would do is you would connect this thing to something like Amazon S3 and then xCloud will run those backups and it will upload them to Amazon S3 for you. This is actually really a good idea because it's getting your backups off site and not on the actual server. So that's something I would recommend. Anyway, if you pop over into monitoring, you got all the same stuff where you can see your, your CPU usage, how much rams used, stuff like that. It's got a interface here for doing redirect, so you can redirect one URL to another URL, but do so on the server level. That way it's not all based on just plugins. It has direct integration in with the email provider. Now one cool thing about this is that when you do a new install of WordPress, it comes with fluent SM automatically installed and hooked up to Elastic Email as the managed service. And you get 100 free emails per month. So it's basically using the free version of Elastic Email. With Cloudways you can get Elastic Email as an add on, but you have to go through the extra rigmarole to get that thing set up and everything. They don't do it for you. So the fact that this just a one click, it comes with the installation is really, really convenient. Of course we could upgrade Elastic if we wanted to do that, or we could connect another provider just the same way and manage it in here. And by the way, under that list of integrations, since I just clicked on that, we, we can integrate this to a storage provider, we can integrate directly with cloudflare cloudflare and use that to manage our DNS and automate the entire thing. It's pretty convenient, right? All right, so let's pop back over to where we were coming back to the site interface. You click on WP Config and you can basically alter your configuration file directly. Alright, a little handy every now and that's not the kind of thing you'd want to do very often. Under Access Details you can get your FTP stuff. You can you. They have a file manager which is something that Cloudways does not have. Now it's not enabled by default for security reasons, but if you need to use it, you just enable this and then you can open it and do what you need to do via your web browser. And then when you want to, you just turn it back off again. But, but the fact that it's even there is super convenient. Pop up here to the database tool. You can manage your database and it's pretty convenient how the, how that actually works. Pop over to your caching area. You've got some control over your caching. You can see that it has more direct integration with WordPress through various plugins that you may be using. The one that it comes with the mo, the by default is using nginx and basically it has a plugin, a little helper plugin that comes Pre installed with WordPress and it's really fast. I mean it's just a very, very fast setup. And, but if you wanted to use WP Rocket or one of these, it'll, it'll work with those as well. And then of course it Comes with object caching that's already built in and ready to go. You've got your log files, you've got your settings. I mean, they've done a really good job here. They got the firewall built into it. If you'd like, you can control a few of your WordPress options. This way you can control your WP cron. This is a handy option here, by the way. If you are using something like fluentcrm and you want to make sure that your automations trigger on time and they're not reliant on WordPress traffic, you can actually control that manually and not just rely on WordPress. So they've got some things that are built into this that are definitely just convenient over top of Cloudways. So that's a control panel. But let's talk about what matters to a lot of you, and that's site performance. Okay, so this was an interesting one that I actually didn't fully expect. But when I moved a site from cloudways over into xCloud, their performance definitely increased substantially. So. Because where you can often tell the speed difference of a server is in the WordPress admin behind the scenes in the back end. Because then everything is fully dynamic and nothing is cached and it's just you're dealing with the raw horsepower of the server back there. Right. So when I moved a site over from cloudways over to xCloud, the control panel was radically faster. And the fact that I would click on something and it felt like it just happened instantly, almost like I was using a desktop app. Now, I'm not naive. I do know that if I were moving much larger sites over, like Buddy Ball sites or something, it probably wouldn't be quite so fast. But then I could just up the horsepower to the server a little bit and it would probably go right back to the way that I wanted it, but it was noticeably faster. So what's the difference here? I want to note here that with Cloudways, I was using a virtual high frequency server in the Atlanta Data Center. It was one CPU and it was two gigabytes of ram. Okay, Because I'm not hosting really big sites on this particular thing. So when I went over to xCloud, what did I do? I picked up a Vulture high frequency server with 1 CPU, 2 gigabytes of RAM in the Atlanta Data Center. So basically the same exact servers in the exact same data center. It's just that I'm managing one with Cloudways and I'm managing the other with xCloud. And even with that environment. It was a lot faster on xCloud. So what's the difference? It comes down to the tech stack that is being put there by xCloud. It's simply better. There's no way around it. Now a big reason a lot of the geeky people when they talk about Cloudways and they're like, yeah, I don't like Cloudways so much when they get into it, it's because they use a older tech stack using Apache as the web server. And I don't want to get real nerdy here, but xCloud doesn't use Apache, it's using nginx. It is a much faster for WordPress. So the whole tech stack is set up to where WordPress sites are going to operate faster. Plugin to do that with, with the Breeze plugin or something similar and what it's just doing then static file spoke for themselves. The other thing too is that if you're going with Cloudways now, you kind of have to use DigitalOcean. And not that DigitalOcean is bad, but I think Vultr's better. I think the performance is a little bit better on Vulture high frequency servers. I like the fact that they have more data center options and xCloud allows you to set up openly so Vultr servers. Not only that, I think if you get the managed server that xCloud is actually providing for you, it is through Vultr. And so they're using a better provider in my personal opinion. Now so far we've talked about that there's some better features with xCloud. We've talked about the fact that the performance is better over on xCloud. But let's talk about the pricing because it's, it's just really interesting. Here we are on Cloudways. Now I'm, I'm not, I'm not, I don't want to hate on Cloudways ways. Okay? I've been a fan of these people for a long time, but I was disappointed when DigitalOcean acquired it and I was concerned about what was going to happen. But the other thing is that their pricing has always been a little bit punishing. If you look down here at there, you got standard and you got premium. Now I'm a big fan of the high frequency servers over at Vultr because they just have some setups that are better for dynamic sites and membership sites and a lot of the type of stuff that I work with. So the equivalent of that on DigitalOcean will be their premium offering. Now if we have a, the Site. The server, similar to what I just mentioned is a two gigabyte of RAM. It's got one core, 50 gigs of storage. You got your two terabytes of bandwidth. They are charging $28 a month for that. Okay. If we go over to the standard offering, it will be $24 a month for that. Okay? Now here's the thing about the way Cloudways works is that take whatever virtual private server you're getting and pretty much double the cost, and that's what you're going to be paying per server. Now it gets really punishing with Cloudways. If you are, if you have multiple servers, if you're hosting multiple VPSs through the same Cloudways account, because you're paying double for every single VPS that you've got. And so it gets to be real cost prohibitive. Really, really quick. Now let's Compare that to xCloud. Okay? Now with xCloud you've got a lot more flexibility. First of all, you've got the X Cloud managed hosting. This would be basically the equivalent of what Cloudways does. Because with Cloudways you don't go separately sign up for the VPs, you just get it through Cloudways, okay? So that the equivalent of that would be the managed server. Now if we pop this down to the 2 gigabyte level, you will see that with 1 CPU, 2 gigabytes of RAM, basically the more or less the same specs, they're at $12 a month. Okay, so that's half, that's a 50% less price. And the reason is, is because they're not doubling the cost on you. And in fact, this is basically a Vulture server. If we go directly over to vulture.com and look at, if you were to get your VPs directly from the provider, that exact server would cost you either $10 a month for the non premium version or if you go down to the what I prefer, which is high frequency, but there it is right here, it's $12 a month. Okay, pop on over to here once again there. Whoop, there we go. Where are we again? And they are charging $12 a month. So it's not a massive upcharge, is it? And so with that, you're getting basically the virtual private server, and yet you're getting the software to run it and you're not paying double for everything. Now let's look over. If you were to sign up like I did, you sign up with your Vulture separately, you connect them up and you manage them. Look what you can do here. You actually do have A free plan where you can manage one server completely for free and you could put 10 sites on it and you have to pay nothing for xCloud. Now, if you want to be able to remove all the limits, okay, you pop up to your starter plan and that's $5 per server. Now keep in mind, you can spec out that server any way that you please and you can put as many websites as you want on it. So you can see how this could get really cost effective for people really, really quickly. And certainly a lot more so than Cloudways because they're not charging double for everything. Now the cool thing is there with xcloud and the way that pricing is working as of this recording is that if you want some super cheap hosting, you can pull it off here because you can go to Vultr, you could get a 1 gigabyte of RAM server, 1 CPU. Okay, it's not going to be a real big beefy VPs, but you can get that bad boy for like five bucks a month, okay? And for simple WordPress sites, it's going to be more than adequate. I would not run a big woocommerce or membership site on such a thing. But for your basic WordPress site, it will totally work for you. And as I just showed you, you can go to xCloud and use the free plan on that server. And your cost for Hosting is now $5 a month. It's also not going to be one of these things like SiteGround will do, where they'll, they'll bait you with a little tiny price and then they're going to basically quadruple that price on you when your prepaid period is over. What you see is what you get with this, and it just is what it is. So $5 a month for your service. Now you're not going to host your email there, stuff like that, you'd have to put that stuff someplace else. But a lot of people do that anyway because they're using Gmail and the like, okay? So it's pretty cool, it's very flexible and I think xCloud actually could be a good option for a lot of people. Now, all that said, are there any downsides? All I've been doing so far is saying how awesome I think xcloud is, okay? But I want to be upfront with you. It's a pretty new company, okay? And for that reason, you can't expect it to have all the maturity of something like Cloudways, not yet, because it's young. And as an example, if you're really interested in somebody to handhold you and really provide good, very fast solutions support. You're probably not going to find it with xCloud there. I think they're gearing up for it. I think that they're getting their systems in line, they're probably hiring in that regard, but right now their support is pretty slow. I've had to deal with their live, I'll call it live chat support on a couple of occasions just to ask them a question, but it is not live chat. It looks like live chat but basically you sit there and there's nobody there talking to you and then I get an email back from the team like a few hours later. So it is not live chat support, but I think that they're working up to it. I'm not going to ding them on this yet, but I just want you to know that going in, if support is really, really important to you from your web host, I wouldn't go to xCloud for that. You need to come into xCloud if you kind of know what you're getting. You, you, you understand the power of a virtual private server and those types of things. You probably are a little bit more hands on with your hosting if you're a complete and total newbie and you don't know what any of that stuff means. I don't know if xCloud would be the right thing. I don't even know if any virtual private server manager would be the right thing for you. You're probably better off going with a company that's going to handhold you a lot better, such as SiteGround. So those are my thoughts on xCloud. I am a fan of xCloud hosting and I am using it. I'm using it for some of my smaller sites and also a few of my site smaller client sites. Now for those of you who may be wondering and you've seen me talk about Rocket hosting. Yes, absolutely. I'm still using Rocket hosting. I host the majority of my client sites on Rocket hosting and I really like them. They're some of the best support I've ever experienced in my entire life. That being said, not everything is a proper fit for, for Run or sorry for Rocket. I'm naming so many companies in my head right now and not everything is worth hosting over there. It's, you know, some sites are just small enough where it was just a be overkill for you to consider a company like Rocket. And it is what it is. And so for that I'm, I used to say, well go Check out Cloudways. Now I'm going to say go check out xCloud. I think it's a better service. I think Cloudways. I'm not going to sit here and badmouth them. But here's the thing. Everything has its time. I think DigitalOcean and Cloudways are probably going to make some improvements and they may make some changes. But at the end of the day, other things have come along. Other things have now out done Cloudways. I can name several of them. XCloud is not the only one. Okay, when it comes to VPS managers, I do think there are a few out there now that I think are now surpassing Cloudways. But I will now put xCloud on that list. It would not have come to my attention if it was not for WP Managed Ninja's investment in it. I'm glad that I now know it's there, I'm using it. And I'm also happy to see what comes of this partnership between the two companies because I'm such a big fan of the Fluent line of plugins and I think there might be some really cool things coming down the road. I don't have any inside knowledge on that, but that marriage between that software package and some hosting, I don't know, some interesting things could occur. It'll be interesting to watch. So anyway, those are my thoughts on xCloud hosting. It is pretty cool. If you'd like to sign up for it, I've got a link below to hit that. And of course again, as I just showed you, they actually even have a free plan. So if you want to go really like affordable and pick up your own virtual private server through Vultr, hook it up to xCloud. You could use it and manage that thing for free. That's a pretty cool option. Alright, if you have any questions, let me know.