The best Cloudways alternatives

Many of us love Cloudways and its approach to super easy server management and app installation, cloning, staging etc. etc. Despite the amazing speed and great customer support, in times of low income people are looking for a cheaper alternative with similar features.

This is when I discovered the best Cloudways alternative

Cloudways alternative: UpCloud + RunCloud

UpCloud and RunCloud together are very similar to what Cloudways offers. So let me run you through the setup.

1.) Create an Upcloud account and create a server. You can create a test account free of charge and run a 1GB cloud server 3 days for free to test it.
2.) Create a RunCloud account and connect your server. You can create a free RunCloud account and test it for 5 days for free.

Here the step by stop instructions with screenshots:

Click “Let’s get started” to connect your server

Choose your provider (in our case UpCloud). As you can see RunCloud supports all major cloud server providers

Choose “Connect via IP Address”. You can find your sever IP address at your UpCloud dashboard or in the email from UpCloud when you registered your server.

Enter your server’s root password and click “Start the installation”. You can find your root password in the email you received from UpCloud when creating the server.

After you clicked “Start the installation” RunCloud will configure your server. This may take 10-15 minutes.

Once the setup is completed, you are greeted by a modern and intuitive server management dashboard and you are ready to install your first application.

Installing WordPress on RunCloud

Navigate to “Web Application” on the left sidebar and select “Create Web App” on the top right.

I usually choose the lastest (and therefore fastest) PHP version. Currently it is 7.4. I selected NGINX+Apache 2 Hybrid, since I would like to be able to access .htaccess. For this first test setup I selected a test domain, for a real setup I would use my own domain or subdomain.

Name your website and define user name and password. You can leave the Database section free unless you want to customise table prefix, user name etc.

And that’s it! It only took a couple of seconds to install WordPress!

I like that RunCloud doesn’t install any additional unnecessary plugins. It only comes with the two default WordPress plugins Hello Dolly and Akismet Anti-Spam

I am very happy with the straightforward approach of creating a server on UpCloud and and managing it with RunCloud. I do believe that this is a great alternative to Cloudways for people who are looking for another option. I hope this article was helpful for you. Please leave a comment if you have any additional input or questions 🙂

Cloudways alternative: UpCloud + RunCloud

Installing WordPress on RunCloud

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