Cloudways - Speed Test & Which Server Should You Choose? (Comparison & Setup)

Hey guys, it's Hogan here and in this video I want to share with you guys the speed test results as well as the load test results That I recently did for the service on cloudways. So right now i'm using the vulture high frequency server for my own website but cloudways recently Added the newest digital ocean premium droplets to their plans and offerings So I wanted to figure out should I actually switch over to the premium droplets or maybe switch over to another provider? So what I decided to do was I did some tests for myself And then I started to figure out okay Maybe I should just do the test for all the servers and that's exactly what I did So in this video, I just wanted to share with you guys the results that I got so that hopefully you guys can make a better Decision on which server to pick for your website and your needs So for those of you who are unfamiliar with cloudways, they are essentially a managed cloud hosting platform So what they basically do is that they connect us to the major cloud infrastructures For example digital ocean aws, which is amazon's company vulture google cloud and linode So these are the infrastructures and you can go straight to the these infrastructures and set it up But it requires a lot more technical knowledge to set up and also manage your website So cloudways sort of make it easy for us to install wordpress and also other applications as well And basically experience really really fast web hosting for our websites So it could be up to like two times or three times speed increase from regular shared hosting So with shared hosting you're sort of sharing resources from one server with other people but with cloud hosting you are sort of Have like a few physical servers which are interconnected and it sort of forms like a virtual environment Which is like a cloud and within that cloud We're able to deploy or launch our own sort of virtual private server and that basically powers our website So it's just a lot more powerful and basically at the same price as well So what i'm going to be doing is we're going to be showing you the speed test results right now So what I basically did you can actually sign up for free in the link below and then i'll show you guys how to set it up towards the end of the video, but Here are the servers So once you actually sign up then you'll be directed to this page where you can simply just add a server Right and you can select your application over here And then we can click on wordpress, so let's just say we can just name our app maybe test demo And then manage server demo one Right, and then here we can actually choose the servers that we want to launch on But the problem is we have so much choice That's why I wanted to share this video with you guys on the speed test results Of these servers and basically give you you know, my recommendations on which one to pick So as you can see, you can just select the servers like one gigabyte of ram Perfect for a small website probably a few small websites and we can select the location And then launch now and then you're basically good to go with your wordpress website, right? You still have to connect your domain which i'll show you how to set up towards the end of the video So with the speed test results what I did was I set up a one gigabyte ram Server for each of these servers except for aws, which was the smallest plan was the two gigabyte ram And the google cloud the smallest one was around the 1.7 gigabyte of ram one So essentially what I did was I set up a google spreadsheet of all the different servers and we did some speed test So the first speed test I did was just a blank wordpress installation So what I did was I tested the speed on pingdom against seven different locations for the blank wordpress website And I got the results So what I want to do is I sort of want to just let you guys know the results first and then sort of discuss Uh, you know the results so over here for the blank site average for linode was 0.65 Digital ocean 0.72 0.73 for digital ocean premium vultures standard 0.77 vulture 0.7 Google 0.71 and aws 0.71 seconds on average for the blank site so Generally, these performed really well If you actually compare it to shared hosting The best shared hosting plans are probably around one second or a little bit more than one second Some of the cheaper ones or you know Some of the not so good ones probably 1.5 or 2 seconds in average load time for just a blank wordpress installation So these perform really well across the different locations as well But the best performance was actually linode, which is actually quite surprising So what I did after is I did another test So I installed a basic woocommerce theme to all the different websites on each of the servers So this was the website that we installed and I tested the home page speed again on pingdom And I got an average of the seven locations And we actually did an average of three to four tests to get an average score for each location So basically what I wanted to do was I wanted to give you guys a sort of a full picture of how well it performed Overall with all the different locations and got an average because a lot of different tests that i've seen is that they normally just test one location and sometimes if you test let's say, uh, you test one hosting provider, they may have a server location in the united states and then you're testing it at Another location and you have another hosting provider and they have the hosting location in a different place and you're testing that Sometimes it doesn't really uh, give you guys a good overall picture of how well it performs because The distance is different from you know server to server. So I wanted to get an overall look And still you know linode performed really well at 1.1 second So the best one actually Was linode digital ocean standard 1.27 1.24 for digital ocean premium So only a little bit of difference A speed increase of 30 milliseconds. So not too much now The thing is what I think is that these websites are sort of a very Uh static website, which is well cached and if you're testing like a cached website like this Uh, the speed increase isn't that much so let's say for example You have a business website where your content is just image and text It's not really like an e-commerce website where people interact on your website or maybe like a social networking website Or a website where you have real estate Like directory or something like that then it's not going to make too much of a difference. So So the same thing with vulture and vulture high frequency the difference isn't too much either So if you have a static type of website, then I don't really see too much of a need to upgrade It's not going to make too much speed difference And you do have to pay two dollars more per month for each of the upgrades as well So if you have a more dynamic website, which can't be as easily caged like maybe you have a social networking website Or you have a website where people need to interact and they need to you know, click on different things and they get different uh Sort of pages then I think it probably is worth the upgrade and you're going to see a much more a bigger speed increase especially if like you're an e-commerce website and people are Navigating your different products. They're adding it to cart adding it to wishlist. They're checking out I think it's probably worth the upgrade if you are But if you're not then maybe not So over here, uh vulture 1.43 and 1.4. They're actually the slowest in my test Unfortunately, and i'm actually on vulture high frequency for my own website. So I may consider switching uh, but the best thing about vulture is that they do have a lot of server locations, so The server location is actually quite important because you want a server location as close to your audience as possible So if you actually look on the different servers, they have a location and digital ocean. They only have eight locations. So for example If i'm a local business in australia, then I probably wouldn't go for digital ocean because they don't have a server location in sydney Now the biggest difference are the biggest factor in terms of the page load speeds is probably going to be the distance the data has to travel So I would probably go with linode in this case where they have a server location sydney or vulture They do have a server in sydney as well. I think for aws and google They did perform really well as well around 1.22 and 1.20 But they're around twice the price of the other plans So if you have the budget then I probably would consider it the major benefit of getting google and aws Is that the ability to scale up your resources and scale down your resources? So what I mean by that is that let's say for example You're an e-commerce website and during q4 you have maybe three times or maybe five times the amount of traffic Maybe for black friday, you might have like huge amounts of traffic Then what you need to do is you need to scale it up, right? Otherwise if your server is doesn't have enough resources It's like if you have your computer right now, you are maybe you are operating maybe 20 different Applications at the same time it's gonna start like lagging right and you're trying to play a game on top of that Then it's just not going to work So you need to scale up your resources and that's the great thing about cloud hosting is that you can scale up your resources And you can scale it down so for aws and google you can scale it up and down automatically like this and it only takes like Maybe five ten minutes depending on how big your server is And things like that, but with the plans on digital ocean linode and vulture You can't really scale down. You can scale up really easily if you need more resources So maybe during q1 where you're not too busy, then you may be scaling down It's very easy to do with google and aws Just by clicking the button like this for vulture and these ones you actually have to go to your servers And you have to click over here And we have to clone the server so we can clone the server over here and we have to clone it down Uh downgrade it right and that's going to take maybe five to ten minutes depending on your server size And then what you need to do is change your dns settings again. So that may result in some downtime So if you are Making thousands of dollars per minute, then I wouldn't go with these plans over here And another thing that you want to take note is that you want to take a look at the incident reports on cloudways so For me, I went with vulture and I did experience some a little bit of downtime I think last year around september or something like that. I didn't actually realize that Vulture actually has more incidents than all the other providers. So that's something to take into account Google and aws barely have any issues at all. So they're really really really really reliable so if you have A client which is really important or you have an important website, then maybe I would go with a more expensive option even though The performance is sort of similar because there are a little bit more reliable and you can scale up and down But that really depends on your budget and your needs So you do want to take a look at it from my understanding is that google aws is most reliable And then linode and then digital ocean and then vulture based on the incident reports over here So as you can see, uh, the next thing I want to discuss is as you can see linode is the fastest in the load times but I I didn't really expect it. So The data center that I tested was new york in new jersey, which is close to new york in the east coast united states And they performed really well for europe as well as uk. So under one second, uh average load time Whereas other ones they were not as fast. Okay So this one was actually really good. So I did another test on linode on california server and the actual result was actually similar to The result that I got for vulture standard, which is 1.43 seconds So, I don't know. So maybe it might be like a different spec on This server here. Maybe they recently upgraded. So if you are Um setting up a server in united states, that might be a good data center to actually, uh choose this one over here So it performed really well, especially for brazil as well And another thing I want to point out is for digital ocean standard digital ocean premium. They also performed, uh, really well for Uh sydney australia. So even though the server location is located in san francisco Uh, they perform the best Uh in terms of load times for australia, so all the other ones were around two seconds so that's something to take into consideration as well because If you have maybe the majority of your audience is in united states Uh, then I'll pick san francisco, but maybe your secondary audience is in australia So that still might be a good option for you rather than picking, you know, uh linode or picking vulture standard so Basically, these are the results and I probably have like a blog post Uh where I show you guys the table of the results so you can actually sort of analyze it closely yourself They also performed for google and aws. They performed okay as well for australia. So if you're wondering let's take a look at The results over here. So again, you know linode for california. They perform very similar to vulture standard high frequency We have to also take a look at the load test that I did as well So basically what the load test is it simulates 200 virtual users on your website at the same time? And how well your website sort of performs under these conditions? So it gives you a good idea of if you have a huge influx of people on your website Does it sort of lag for some people and is it fast for some people and maybe for other people? It's just like really slow So overall, uh, they performed really well for the google server There was it was very very stable with a standard deviation of around three milliseconds So with 200 people on the website at the same time the the speed was actually very good So that basically means like if you're an e-commerce website, maybe you're promoting something on facebook ads and then a huge Influx of people come then it's going to remain pretty constant the speed for all Your visitors same thing for aws, even though it does look a little bit more bumpier, but it's only going up by one or One or two ms. So the standard deviation is around two ms, which is very good For digital ocean standard again, pretty good 3.1 ms standard deviation So only going up, uh, maybe one two around yeah, so maybe two to three ms going up by And digital ocean premium droplets. So this one actually performed really well 1.29 ms so they could handle Uh the traffic really easily same thing for vulture Standard around 0.83 Uh, it actually performed the best For the standard vulture server same thing for the high frequency server performed really well as well 0.73 So this one was 83. Okay. So this one's 73 so vulture actually handled traffic really well So if you have a high traffic website, uh, you're gonna have really really stable response times as well So the one that performed not as well was actually linode. So linode actually had a standard deviation of 11 ms So it was a little bit more bumpier So sometimes it was like maybe 24 ms in response time. Sometimes it goes up to 36 So it was a little bit more bumpy, but if you actually compare it to shared hosting So this is the results from shared hosting provider that I did. It was actually only with 20 virtual users on the website So the standard deviation was 26 as you can see, it's very bumpy with shared hosting with cloud hosting Generally, it's scalable and more reliable than shared hosting and this is another test that I did with 100 virtual users on the same website So as you can see, the response time is not great at all so As you can see maybe like 1000 ms sometimes and that's gonna basically impact your page load times, right? And this is another test on a shared hosting provider for another website And as you can see, uh, not very good at all. So like 2000 ms just really bad performance. So That's something to take into consideration as well The load test results So if we go back over here and we go back to the servers over here And maybe let's go click on add server And let's go over here. Let's type in something. Yes, and yes demo okay, another benefit of digital ocean is that We can pick digital ocean standard and we can launch now and we can actually upgrade Directly to the premium plan like that just with one click So with vulture if you want to upload, uh, sorry if you want to upgrade from standard to high frequency, you can't really do that Right, you have to clone the server to high frequency. So that's also something to take into consideration as well It's going to be more convenient if we go with digital ocean So you can scale up and down really easily The other thing that I want to point out is that cloudways only have access to the Intel servers on the digital ocean premium droplets. So on digital ocean, they actually released two Premium droplets one with the amd, uh processes and one with the intel So from the test results from another blog I actually found that they did the test results and amd actually performed Almost two to three times better than the basic digital ocean plan And two times better than the intel plan. So unfortunately on digital ocean, you can't you don't have access to the amd processes So that's also something to take into account as well So overall, uh cloud hosting is really good compared to shared hosting Hopefully you guys can sort of make up your own decision because I think every every scenario is a little bit different and you can take this information and Uh, try to digest it and figure it out for your needs and things like that So what i'm going to do now is i'm going to show you guys basically how to set up your wordpress website And connect it to domain and sort of set it up as well So below this video there's going to be a link and that's going to take you over here And you can click on get started for free And that's going to ask you to sign up so you don't need any credit card details You just need to put in your name as well as your email address So you can actually try it out for three days and you can test the speed for yourself And I think it's just going to be really amazing. So i'm going to put in my email and i'm going to set in a new password And then i'm going to set it digital agency. I need to improve performance Set that in and I think for promo code, I think you can use hogan So h-o-g-a-n for a 20 discount for the first three months once you actually do sign up And I agree and then get started for free Okay, so you should see this page here now before we can deploy it What we need to do is activate the account just by checking your email. So once it's activated we can set up our Servers, so we're going to click on close here So over here, we need to set an application name. So i'm just going to do maybe a test demo Now this server is going to be maybe my my first server or main server or whatever you want to name it Project is going to be a tutorial project That's and over here So i'm going to select digital ocean because my main audience is going to be based in the united states and I do have Some people based in australia and digital ocean does load quite quickly for the australian audience And it also is the cheapest at ten dollars per month So for ten dollars a month for one gigabyte of ram So I basically have around I think five websites on the lowest plan Uh for my clients in australia and it's completely fine So you can have probably up to maybe 10 small websites on it and you'll be totally fine before you need to actually upgrade to the two gigabyte ram servers so for Uh, ten dollars you're getting a really great deal. It is the cheapest among the Servers over here for linode. It starts at 12 vulture. It is 11 for standard and High frequency I believe is 13 For the one gigabyte ram and aws and google is going to be more expensive So we're going to start off with digital ocean and i'm going to select the location which is closest to my audience I think I might go with san francisco And then all you need to do is click on launch now, so That is basically going to launch your servers Uh on the digital ocean servers, right and everything Uh cloudways is doing behind the scenes so you don't really need to worry and then after once it's set up the servers then we can Basically log into our wordpress installation So while that is actually setting up the second step that we need to do Is we need to purchase a domain name, which is basically your website address Dot com so like your name.com or your business name.com. So I personally recommend using namecheap It's really cheap and you also get a domain privacy for free so I might just do something like cloud tutorial one two three and click on search over here And i'm going to scroll down and generally I recommend picking the dot com version Because that's probably the most trustworthy one and what people normally type in but because this is a tutorial I might go for This one over here. It's really cheap. Add to cart. Let's just check out And over here for one year, it's only like a dollar and you also get free domain privacy that so that's amazing So what we're going to do is just go and confirm order And if you don't have an account, then you'll need to create an account I'm just going to sign in and continue and just pay for that So i'm just going to be right back. Okay. So after around five to ten minutes the server has finished setting up So to access your website, so this is your server, which is basically like your computer Your application is like your program so you can just toggle that and this is going to be your website so click into that And we're just going to close this over here And then to access your wordpress to just test it without the domain we can click over here And this is going to be your wordpress. So we're going to go over here copy the username Paste it in and then close that or delete that. Sorry and then copy your password over Paste that in and log in So from here we can close that add that as a password And you can go visit site and you can play around with your wordpress website Just like any other wordpress installation and you can install a theme and you can try and test the speed out yourself So it's super quick. There's no lag. You can click on stuff and just happens instantly Click on post and it just loads really quickly. You delete something and it deletes So it's just really really amazing now the next step is let's say if you want to migrate your website Then we can go back to the servers Right, and you can watch this video to learn how to migrate another website by using the cloudways wordpress migrator plugin It's really easy to actually set up Or you can actually claim a free migration once you actually upgrade your account So the next step is let's say for example, you are happy with the speed you can go back to the wordpress website Click over here Okay. So what we're going to do is we're going to connect this domain name So this one over here connect it with our server. So to do that what we need to do is click on manage For our name chip accounts for that domain And this is the same for if you purchase your domain from go daddy or from another hosting Provider you have to go to your domain and go to your dns settings So this one i'm just going to click on advanced dns And then over here, let's go back To our website. Okay So what we're going to need to do is we just need to copy the ip address so we can copy the ip address over here Now this is going to be the same if we go to the servers I believe so click over here We can just copy it like that right on the server the ip And then come back over here and then we can add new record Set it to a record and for the host we're going to put at oops Sorry at and then paste in the ip address And then click on tick The next thing that we need to do is do it again. So a record And then do www and then put in the ip address And then tick So what we're doing is we're just connecting our domain name with the server, right? So once we do that, then it's going to take maybe 15 to 20 minutes for that to connect So the other thing that we need to do is we need to go back to our applications. You can click on over here Let's click on this And then the next thing we need to do is we need to add the domain name onto our cloudways account So click on domain management and then over here primary domain we're gonna copy the domain name over here copy that and Paste that in Okay, so delete that space and then we can click on save changes So once that is done the last step that we need to do is we need to add a ssl certificate Which is essentially the lock icon for our domain name if we let's say we click on our domain name Domain management and let's just go copy this and perhaps just paste it into here So what you're going to notice is that it says not secure So what we need to do is we need to install the ssl certificate Onto the domain name. So for each of the applications we can install the ssl certificate for free. So click on that So before we actually do this Generally, what you want to do is you want to go to what's my dns.net and paste in your domain name And click on a record and click on search so what we want to do is we want to make sure that the Sort of domain name has propagated to the ip address. So as you can see Most of it has actually propagated and now it's actually really really quick So let's go back over here and then we can put in our email address So admin at hoganchua.com and then our domain name paste that in and install certificate Once that is installed, then we're pretty much good to go. I'm going to click on enable https And then click on close So let's head back over here and refresh and then that should be good to go So let's go to wp-admin to log in And then we can go back to access details over here. We can click on this username paste that in Copy here our password and paste that in and log in Okay, so that is pretty much it Now before we leave I do want to give you guys a few tips So if we go to plugins over here, so the default caching plugin is actually breeze by cloudways This is the caching plugin. So in my test I was using wp fastest cache for my first test and then I switched to the breeze plugin and I did find an increase in speed for my page load times as well as Increase in speed when navigating within the dashboard area So that's something that I want to let you guys know and another thing is if we go to our servers So we're going to click over here You can go to the settings and packages if you ever want to upload something bigger than 10 megabytes Then for example, you want to upload a file or image generally, you probably don't need to unless you are migrating something But if you do you can go to settings and packages and change the upload size over here And I generally put a 256 for my memory limit and we can click on save changes And if we go to packages over here The default php might be set to like 7.1 and I generally have it at 7.4 So that's probably going to increase your performance as well. And you can also update your maria db to I think 10.3 that's what I normally have it at So yeah, so that is pretty much it if you have any troubles in contact their support team over here by click on need a hand But you do have three days in this free trial So you do need to upgrade if you do want to keep your website and things like that So if you have any questions drop it in the comment section down below and perhaps i'll try to create another video for that