A reliable web host is unlike any other friend when you’re super monitoring your website. You should be able to spread your wings and expand those horizons without all the fuss. In our search of many web-hosting providers, we found one name that is powerful enough to scale your website effectively – Cloudways.

Why Cloudways is a great choice

This Malta-based managed cloud hosting provider ensures you never lag behind due to lack of resources. Cloudways is ideal for speed, security and scalability. You can easily increase your functionality at pocket-friendly prices.

Cloudways provides a layer of abstraction that takes away the trouble of setting up or maintaining the servers. Their data centers are present all across the globe ensuring effective connectivity day in and day out. As the name suggests, they offer managed cloud hosting for e-commerce stores, web developers, designers, bloggers, agencies, SMEs, and startups etc.

If it sounds tempting already, feel free to begin with a three day trial at no cost. Though, three days may not be enough for everyone but it’s better than you think it is. You will be able to build test servers and explore different features without having to provide anything but your email address. No banking, credit card or other sensitive details are required.

Cloudways – Simple, Fast and Convenient

Create a cloud server with Cloudways and host your website(s) on the top five cloud providers of the industry, including: Amazon (AWS), DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, or Google Cloud Platform.

Be rest assured, you will be getting a 99% uptime when hosting your website with Cloudways. The industry leading cloud providers play a vital role to ensure your website does not suffer from excess downtime. Also, you don’t have to have an account with any of these providers as Cloudways will set them up for you.

Unlike shared hosting, Cloudways’ cloud servers provide you with dedicated resources in order to enhance your website’s speed and stability. It supports a variety of performance boosting technologies such as PHP7, Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, Redis and HTTP/2.

Cloudways also offers automated installation of popular apps such as WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, and other PHP-based apps.

A generic ‘PHP application’ option enables installation and you can always manually install whatever else you need. If your websites aren’t too demanding, you can install multiple applications on each server and attach them to different domains with free SSL certificates.

How Cloudways works

1. To begin with, sign up with Cloudways by completing a simple form and clicking on the START FREE button. If you have already signed up, log in to your account.



2. You will have to verify your e-mail in order to complete the signup process. After successful signup, click on the LAUNCH button to initiate the server launch process.



3. Server and Application Details: Select from the list of applications. Name your Application, Server and Select Your Project.
4. Choose from the list of cloud providers. Select your SERVER SIZE based on your expected monthly traffic (No need to worry about unusual spikes as you can always scale your server with just a slider).
5. Now select your desired LOCATION.



6. After entering the Server and Application details, click LAUNCH NOW. You need to wait for a while so that your servers are ready for your use.



7. Once the server is ready, go to Platform and click Applications in the top-left menu. Select the app from the drop-down menu.



8. Go to ACCESS DETAILS > ADMIN PANEL. You will see the login credentials and the URL of your website. Click the URL and use the credentials to log in to your dashboard.

That’s it. Congratulations! You have successfully installed your website on the cloud server of Cloudways. A piece of cake right?

Cloudways: Pros and Cons

Let’s delve deeper into the pros and cons of this managed cloud hosting provider.

Pros

• With the availability of three day free trial featuring 512MB and 1GB of RAM, you can test their cloud servers without paying a dime. Hence, feel free to try out their services before signing up.
• Cloudways offers one website migration at no additional cost.
• Their console is a user-friendly control panel that allows you to manage your server with ease. It includes a variety of useful features. The most distinguished being monitoring the servers and other scaling tools.
• Top-notch web-based technical support is available 24/7 for your assistance.
• Cloudways supports numerous apps without any trouble.
• Enjoy unmatched security with FREE SSL Certificates.
• There are no limitations on installing WordPress websites.
• Their automatic website backups are easy to configure and can be scheduled as per will.
• The pay-as-you-go pricing model ensures that you are only charged for what you consume after scaling server resources.
• In addition to WordPress, Cloudways also offers web-hosting solutions for other content management systems such as Magento, Joomla, Drupal, and Moodle as well.

Cons

• No option to register domains.
• Cloudways is a Platform-as-a-Service company. Hence, unfortunately you cannot use Plesk or cPanel. They provide you with their own console so that you can effectively manage applications hosted on different cloud servers.

• Cloudways is a powerful and a high-performing cloud hosting solution available at a very reasonable price. @cloudways cloudways.com/ via @supermonitoring

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The Final Verdict

With a great balance between functionality and affordability, Cloudways is a powerful and a high-performing cloud hosting solution available at a very reasonable price. It can be a little complicated for the beginners but demanding users will certainly enjoy Cloudways.

Their cloud servers offer a fantastic feature set and you can easily scale resources as your website grows. Their one-stop Cloud Console makes operations simpler for those who are unwilling to deal with command lines or multiple user interfaces.

If by any chance, you’re still on the fence about hosting your website on Cloudways, then sign-up for the 3-day free trial and test their platform to your heart’s content.

Data safety is a major concern for users when surfing the Internet. The complete knowledge of what their computer is sending across the browser to the website they are visiting might not always be clear to most users, but the reassurance that that data is in safe hands and will not be misused is sufficient. That’s the primary reason most websites these days use SSL certificates to protect the data they accept from users and to show to their visitors that they’ve taken the necessary precautions. After all, if a website is flagged as unsecure, would you want to visit it at all?

Secure VS Unsecure Browsing

When referring to some websites as secure, what is being referred to is the small padlock you see in the title bar of your browser and an “HTTPS” prefix to the website URL that you’re shown. This means that the website you’re visiting has been secured with an SSL certificate. For those of our readers who aren’t fully aware of it, an SSL certificate is a digital data file that binds a cryptographic key to an organization’s details. When installed on a web server, it activates the https protocol and the padlock and allows secure connections from a web server to a browser. SSL is typically used to secure credit card transactions, data transfer and logins, and more recently is becoming the norm when securing social media browsing.

With Facebook’s “data leak” becoming the talk of the town recently, the general public has become more aware of secure browsing and thus, most users have started paying attention to the “security” aspect of browsing. Most anti-viruses with Internet protection also mark websites as secure and unsecure based on SSL certificate authentications. Naturally, if a user’s browser or anti-virus marks a webpage as unsecure, his inclination towards visiting that webpage diminishes. And that’s where the catch lies for you.

If you own a blog or a website and don’t wish to lose out on your traffic, starting July 2018, you will have to make your blog or website HTTPS secure. And there are a lot of reasons you should absolutely be doing so.

Google down-ranks non-HTTPS websites

Although Google’s crusade against unsecure or unencrypted websites started years ago, in 2015, the Internet giant announced down-ranking HTTP sites. The move was done to make the entire Internet a safer place for users in general. With the onset of 2017, Chrome started marking password and credit card number fields on unencrypted sites as “Not secured”. And in 2018, Chrome is slated to start displaying a red “not secure” warning for all websites that are not secured with SSL (HTTP). Since Chrome is currently web browser number 1 with most users worldwide using it as their default, other browser vendors are sure to follow its lead and mark non-HTTPS websites as “not secure”.

While this is a great move security wise, it poses somewhat of an inconvenience for a lot of website and blog owners out there. Ever since the announcement came out, everyone is switching from HTTP to HTTPS, not only to preserve their loyal traffic, but also to prevent their website from being down-ranked. If you’re one of such users, well, you got no choice buddy! You should be switching to HTTPS too. Not only to avoid warnings being displayed with your website, but to make your and your users’ data more secure.

And contrary to what you may think, switching from HTTP to HTTPS can be easy and painless if you do it right. All you need to do is:

• Purchase an SSL certificate
• Have this certificate installed (by your server admin or shared hosting service provider)
• Change links on your website and create redirections for all URLs (for users and for Google)

In this article, we’re focusing mainly on the “purchasing an SSL certificate” step. So strap on and get ready to find out all there is to know about this.

Types of SSL Certificates

Before going into how and where to buy SSL certificates, you need to know that there are several types of SSL Certificates. You need to select the one most appropriate to your business.

Domain Validated (DV) certificates

A Domain Validated certificate (DV) is an X.509 digital certificate typically used for Transport Layer Security (TLS). This certificate proves that the domain name of the applicant has been validated by proving some control over a DNS domain. In simple terms this means that the Certificate Authority confirms only the right of the applicant to use the domain.

The only criterion for obtaining a domain validated certificate is having a proof of control over your domain’s “whois” records, DNS records file, and email or web hosting account. Most web browsers may show a lock and a DNS domain name but a legal entity is never displayed. This is because domain validated certificates don’t include a legal entity in their subject.

Organization Validation (OV) certificates

An Organization Validation (OV) certificate is issued to a website if it is able to meet 2 criteria: the right to administratively manage the domain name, and, the organization’s actual existence as a legal entity. In this case, Certificate Authority confirms the right of the applicant to use the domain plus verifies some organization details.

As opposed to DV certificates which are merely checked against domain registry, OV certificates are trusted since they are strictly authenticated by real agents against business registry databases hosted by governments. This certificate confirms to the X.509 RFC standard and is the standard type of certificate required on a commercial or public facing website.

Extended Validation (EV) certificates

HTTPS websites that prove the identity of the legal entity controlling them are issued an Extended Validation (EV) certificate. Obtaining an EV certificate requires that a Certificate Authority verifies the identity of the requesting entity. In this case, the Certificate Authority confirms the right of the applicant to use the domain plus it conducts a thorough verification of the organization.

For such a website, next to the lock icon an additional information is displayed (usually the organization name). This option is used by all banks, financial institutions, etc. The criteria for issuing EV certificates are defined by the Guidelines for Extended Validation.

Single domain VS Wildcard

Out of the 3 package types that SSL certificates come in, “Single-domain” certificates can only be used on one specific website, and “Wildcard” certificates can be used on any website within a specific domain name. The technical difference between the two comes down to the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) field that is embedded in the certificate when it’s issued. If a certificate has only one SAN field and it contains a reference to a single website, then it’s a single-domain certificate. If that one SAN field contains an asterisk in the website name, then it’s a wildcard certificate.

Wildcard SSL certificates can be used to secure an unlimited number of websites and their subdomains (but not sub-subdomains). They are also about 10 times more expensive than a single certificate. To obtain a certificate for a sub-subdomain you have to buy another one for it – or get yourself an Subject Alternative Name (SAN) a.k.a. Unified Communication Certificate (UCC SSL) which is, in fact, an multi-domain certificate.

Now that you know what types of SSL certificates exist, you can take a decision as to which one will best suit your website. Once you’ve made that choice, the next step is to figure out where you can purchase the certificate from (yes there are multiple vendors for each) and exactly how much will you have to shell out for it.

Where can I buy an SSL certificate?

You might be a little surprised to know that providing SSL certificates is something multiple vendors do, and they are often not related to the government at all. In fact, the most easily approachable SSL certificate vendor is your website’s hosting provider.
You can easily obtain an SSL certificate in one of the following ways:

Free option – Let’s Encrypt

Let’s Encrypt is a free SSL certificate service provided by the Internet Security Research Group (sponsored by Mozilla Foundation, Akamai and Cisco, among other) since 2016. Not only is it free, but also easy to use. They provide tools that can be installed on a web server by a hosting provider and that makes installing a certificate is very easy for the provider’s users. Let’s Encrypt offers Wildcard certificates, but doesn’t offer Extended Validation.

5 Top Globally Trusted SSL Certificate Issuers

1. Comodo – A Comodo SSL Certificate is the quickest and the most cost effective method for an online business to protect its customers’ transactions. Apart from the low cost, each certificate comes with a great value-added package including features like mobile-friendly version, site seal, dedicated customer support, etc., which makes it perfect for small to medium size businesses.
2. GeoTrust – GeoTrust provides retail and reseller services for SSL encryption, and website authentication, digital signatures, code signing, secure email, and enterprise SSL products. Their primary products include Multi-Domain Certificates, Wildcard SSL Certificates, UC/SAN SSL certificates, Enterprise SSL, and many more.
3. RapidSSL – RapidSSL issues SSL certificates within minutes of enrolling with it and they help website owners develop and launch secure sites quickly. They provide customers with the confidence of secure browsing with https, closed padlock and a static trust mark for download and display on your site.
4. Symantec – One of the most trusted names in anti-viruses, Symantec offers SSL/TSL certificates to websites for the most recognized trust mark on the web. The Norton Secured Seal next to a website’s search listing adds power to its brand and click-through rates. They provide basic, Wildcard, as well as EV validation certificates.
5. Thawte – Thawte Consulting is a certificate authority (CA) for X.509 certificates. SSL certificates from Thawte provide robust authentication and encryption, reassuring website visitors that their data and transactions are secure.
   You can either buy their certificates from them directly or from any third-party vendors.

Your own Hosting Provider

The easiest path is to purchase an SSL certificate from your hosting provider and have them install it at once without any additional costs.

Cheapest SSL Certificates

If you don’t want the free certificate but would like to buy the cheapest one, there are several third-party SSL certificate sale sites which offer certificates from popular vendors on discounted prices. Browse to namecheap.com or ssl2buy.com, where you can find a PositiveSSL certificate from Comodo for close to $9 per year (at cheapsslshop.com even for $7, but it’s a sale price).

For CDN Users

If you’re using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) on your website (like CloudFlare), you can decide to use a certificate provided by the network and not purchase it yourself.

• HTTPS your website: which SSL Certificate to choose and where to buy supermonitoring.com/blo… via @supermonitoring

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Wrapping it up

Hopefully at this point you know sufficiently well about SSL certificates and how to obtain them. So your immediate next step should be checking what kind of SSL certificate installation your website has. To verify if your SSL certificate has been installed properly, use https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ and check if you get “A” grade. If you do, you’re good to go. If not, you can always use one of the methods mentioned in the list above. Installing an SSL certificate, if it’s not automated (like with Let’s Encrypt), is quite an easy task for any server administrator.

Here’s wishing you a happy and safe browsing experience!

If you value your data, you know you should back it up. Be it personal or professional, some data is just too important to not be secured. That’s the reason tech papers and websites keep publishing articles on data security and backing up needs, and also horrific tales of data loss!! If you don’t want to end up on the wrong side of data loss, you better back up your website data in time.

Your website may contain your company information, product pages, blog posts and more. Do you really think sheer good luck would be enough to keep that entire data safe? Can you imagine staying afloat if all the hard work behind building and maintaining your website went to trash? If the answer to those questions is “No”, safeguard your website with CodeGuard today!

CodeGuard – Your website’s time machine!

Taking backups is a good habit, but taking clever backups is an art. A majority of us still rely on conventional backup techniques like external hard disks, CD/DVDs and the like for securing our data. While these are all still very effective, they themselves run the chance of damage over time. Hence, most people and corporates use Cloud backups today as a robust and ultra-secure backup technique. CodeGuard is probably the most widely used and trusted Cloud backup service available in the market.

Having a Cloud backup means you’ll have the freedom to access your backup data from anywhere in the world. Plus, you won’t need to physically carry any removable devices with you when you want to refer to it. Add to that, the benefit of saving everything over the Internet, and you have a clear winner!

With an efficient and easy to set up interface, CodeGuard makes backing up, monitoring and maintaining your website a piece of cake. Just sign up and you’ll be provided with a 14-day free trial of this awesome service. For signing up, CodeGuard gives you the option to provide the usual details, or alternatively, your PayPal account details if you have one. Using PayPal though facilitates a smoother paying scheme, comes with an attached string – you don’t get the free trial. So choose wisely here!

CodeGuard assures that once you’ve enrolled with them, you can simply forget about your backing up needs. They’ll take of everything. From automatic timely backups to tracking changes to rolling back to previous backups if needed – they’ve got it all under control. You can finally have the peace of mind you wanted!

Why would you need CodeGuard

Maintaining a website is a challenging task. There is so much text and media to take care of. And if your website includes user accounts and their details, its even tougher. You have the additional responsibility of protecting your user’s data too. As such, backing everything up becomes even more crucial.

Modern day websites face many threats including hacking, accidental deletion of data, injections of unwanted code, software upgrade failures and others. Protecting your data means saving yourself from loss of time, money and reputation.

Key benefits of CodeGuard

When it comes to offering significant advantages, CodeGuard shines like a star! The timely automatic backups mean that you have one less thing to remember. You won’t need to set any reminders for this. Just sign-up, setup and forget about it.

CodeGuard proves its real worth if there are many people having access your website’s database. It highlights changes made to code and other data so that you can keep track of what is going on when you’re not around. That gives you the edge and authority to keep tabs on unwanted code injections and data changes on the website. With an easy rollback option to a previous state, CodeGuards makes sure that only the data you want to make public is exposed on your website.

A mere look at the pricing options is enough to realize how cost-effective CodeGuard is. Plus, it is cross-platform – another medal in the bucket!
A section of CodeGuard’s website is dedicated to explain to new users how it works. This section contains text and screen-shots that offer a sneak peek into the tool’s Control Panel that helps potential users understand the tool better.
A nice to have feature to the CodeGuard website is their blog which contains quite informative articles. Accompanied by video tutorials, these articles give a new dimension to learning.

Here’s the catch

The only issue with this brilliant tool is that you can’t start using this tool until you make the payment. That is, even to receive a free trial, you will have to pick a payment plan and fill in your card details. So basically, signing up isn’t free!

To some people that might be a hindrance because when it comes to filling in card details, you can’t be in a lets-try-and-see-how-it-works mode. You’ll want to be sure. It would have been a lot better if users were given the choice to try out the tool only by giving in their basic details – no card details involved. That way, if they love the tool, they will anyways purchase it post the trial. And at that time, they’ll be sure enough!

In the absence of such a setting, you’ll simply have to rely on the testimonials provided on CodeGuard’s website for reference. While some of us might find relying on other user’s statements easy, others might prefer experiencing it themselves first.
So is this really a glitch? Definitely for some, not so much for others!

• Get a time machine for your website and back it up with @CodeGuard codeguard.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Words

A good website backup plan includes backing up all the data to a location where it is easy to maintain, manage and restore when needed. What better location for that than the Internet! No access restriction, no time limits and no space constraints. Plus it’s all automated and super smooth. Try out CodeGuard today and experience what so many people have been appreciating.