How to Host Laravel on DigitalOcean Using Cloudways

Cloud technology has seen immense growth since its inception. It has revolutionized the sphere of tech with its advanced infrastructure, empowering companies to functionalize their operations more proactively than ever. Many of the big tech giants like Google, Amazon have already moved to the cloud, and many more are following the same trend.

Today, there are many platforms available in the market that provide top of the class cloud services, and Cloudways is one of them. With Cloudways, it has become much easier for organizations to shift their business on cloud and get high-quality web resources to grow their operations.

It is one of the widely known managed cloud hosting brands in the market, having years of experience in providing advanced hosting services associated with industry-leading cloud names. So, let’s get some details about Cloudways and its services below:

A Little about Cloudways

Cloudways is one of the fastest-growing cloud companies in the market, having its data centers in more than 50+ locations around the world. The platform provides optimized cloud hosting solutions for SMBs, digital agencies, ecommerce store owners and other business units, and helps them to deploy/manage applications on world-leading cloud providers including DigitalOcean (DO).

Here are some of the salient features of Cloudways which makes it a quite advanced and unique web hosting for PHP in the market:

Thunderstack

Cloudways is known as a developer-friendly platform, that is why provides a unique stack of tools called Thunderstack for assisting dev works. It is a unique compilation of major web tools including Redis, Varnish cache, Memcached, PHP-FPM and others, made to give developers the ease to manage their application functions as per requirements.

The stack comes pre-configured in every newly launched Cloudways server and is easily manageable from the backend admin panel. You can easily enable/disable preferred services from there based on your project requirements, as it is quite effortless and timing friendly.

Regular Data Backups

With Cloudways data backup feature, users don’t have to bother about any accidental data loss as it is completely taken care of by the platform. The backup feature takes regular data backup of the deployed applications, ensuring that the data is easily recoverable in case of any sudden breakdown. The platform also provides users the ease to schedule their own data backup timing based on the app requirements.

Moreover, a unique automated tool called CloudwaysBot also notifies users about the backup updates. It gives users valuable insights about their server performance, site traffic usage, new feature updates, and more platform updates.

Staging Environment

The staging environment is yet another amazing feature of Cloudways, as it helps users to deploy and test applications first on a testing server. Its major purpose is to provide users valuable insights about their application loopholes before taking it live. The platform also provides a separate staging domain to deploy applications and test its performance.

Using this staging feature, developers get to know core errors of their applications, hence they can also debug it accurately with a more precise solution. It is a great feature for developers to deploy, test and fix applications before taking them live.

PHP-FPM, Varnish & CRON Settings

Integrated with PHP-FPM & Varnish, Cloudways provides a user-friendly UI panel to manage website caching functions. Both of these tools are quite known in the dev community, as they provide hassle-free cache management for web applications. They are automatically configured in the Thunderstack once the server is launched, yet can also be changed & modified according to project requirements.

Meanwhile, setting CRON jobs for the application is also quite easy on the platform. There is a whole separate panel built on the platform to define custom CRON job scripts. Just go to the CRON Management tab, define script URLs with desired execution time and that’s it.

Popular Frameworks & CMS Installation

Cloudways is not just a platform that offers technical features but it also offers automated installation of some of the most used framework/CMS solutions in the market.
Users can also install Laravel, one of the most used PHP frameworks, quite easily on Cloudways. You can effortlessly install Laravel on the platform using Composer which is quite user-friendly and easy to understand.

Let’s see how to install Laravel on Digital Ocean cloud server using the Cloudways platform.

How to Host Laravel on DigitalOcean Using Cloudways

Hosting Laravel application on the Cloudways platform is super-easy. It neither requires coding nor technical knowledge, as all the processes are automated and taken care of by the platform itself.

To begin with, simply signup on Cloudways and verify the account at your earliest. Upon completing the verification process, follow the step-by-step process defined below to set up your Laravel application on DigitalOcean cloud server.

Select Your Application

First of all, select the Laravel application from the drop-down menu, then give your application, server, and project the desired name.

Select Cloud Provider

Now, select DigitalOcean as your cloud server from the given cloud providers’ list.

Select Server Size

Next, choose your desired server size based on your application requirements. It is always advised to select the server size given the future traffic load of your website. However, upon a hike in traffic, you can always scale up your server size using the same menu.

Select Location

The next step is to select your server location from the given drop-down menu. Always try to select the location which sits nearest to your site audience, so that your app becomes easily accessible without any delays and high latency rates.

Launch

Once completing all the above processes and checking the price, click on the ‘Launch’ button. Your server will be ready within a few minutes!

Final Words

This brings us to the end of this article, which highlighted some of the most advanced features of Cloudways and a step-by-step demonstration about how to host Laravel application on DigitalOcean using the Cloudways platform. DigitalOcean ranks among the world’s best cloud server providers, as its infrastructure is highly advanced and greatly secured as well.

That is why users love opting DigitalOcean for deploying their web applications, and for that, there is no better platform than Cloudways to host applications with DO.

If you still got some more questions regarding this article or want to contribute your thoughts on it, please feel free to write down your opinions below in the comments section.