Host with InstaWP live
InstaWP Live is a service where users can create a fully functional WordPress website ready for live traffic. This means that InstaWP not only creates websites, but also provides high-performance back-end code and specially configured servers for your website, speeding the development process and ensuring that the site is ready for public access.
You can choose from different pricing plans and those plans typically include services such as CPU, server space, bandwidth, and other resources. This service takes care of providing and managing the hosting infrastructure for users. This simplifies the user experience, as they don't need to handle the technical aspects of hosting like managing servers etc.
In this documentation, we will explore the steps to:
Create InstaWP Live Hosted Site
Manage Live Hosted Site
Connect Settings
Hosting Settings
→ Dashboard
→ SFTP SSH
→ Backup
→ Map Domain
→ Delete
→ View Logs
→ Clone
→ DB Editor
Migrate WP Site to Live Site
View Hosting Subscription
Create New WaaS
Let’s get started 🚀
Step 1: Sign in to your InstaWP account to access the dashboard and click on the Hosting button from the top navigation bar.
Step 2: You will be redirected to the hosting page. Click on the + New Site button from the top right corner of the interface.
Step 3: Select the InstaWP Live option from the modal window to host a new site with InstaWP and click on the Next Step button.
Step 4: The pricing plan page will appear. Select a Pricing plan based on your preferences, and can optionally use the Pricing Calculator to minimise pricing on purchasing more sites. For more information, visit here.
Step 5: After selecting your preferred pricing plan, click on the Next Step button.
Step 6: Configure website settings by defining the values (as described in the table below). Once done, click the Next Step button.
If you have purchased our Whitelabel addon, you can use the domain such as sitename.yourdomain.com from this screen.
Step 7: A modal window for Plugins & Themes will appear, allowing you to select themes and plugins from the available categories:
→ Popular
→ Security
→ SEO
→ Social Media
→ Speed
→ Forms
→ Backups
→ Page Builders
→ Marketing
→ Utility
→ eCommerce
→ Translation
After selecting plugins & themes according to your preferences, click the Go Live button.
Step 8: Click on the Yes button in the modal window to proceed further.
This will create your new WordPress Live site alongside the URL and login credentials.
Note: This WordPress live site will have the InstaWP Connect plugin installed, allowing you to auto-login the WP Admin panel or create staging sites and host them on your InstaWP cloud servers. For more information, refer to this document.
Once connected, manage your newly created InstaWP Live hosted site by configuring the options from the following settings:
Connect Settings
Hosting Settings
You can choose the Purge cache option to free up server resources, making your connected site function faster and more efficiently, particularly in terms of a site's Time to First Byte (TTFB), by serving pages and static cache directly from the closest server available to visitors.
You can configure the following options that are available on the hosting settings:
Dashboard
SFTP SSH
Backup
Map Domain
Delete
You can view your InstaWP Live - hosted website’s space & cores used with basic information such as PHP, WordPress version, or database size.
Note: The user can also change their PHP and WordPress version on their InstaWP Live Hosted Site.
You can also use the Edge Caching feature that saves your page cache (which is only stored in your site's server center) to any of the operated data centers worldwide such as: Dallas, San Jose, Ashburn, Seattle, Miami, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, New York (US), Toronto (CA) Singapore, Sao Paolo, (BR), London (UK), Vienna, Sydney (AU), Hong Kong (CHN), Stockholm (SE) Madrid (ESP), Paris (FR), Frankfurt (GER) Johannesburg (SA), Osaka (JP) & Mumbai (IN).
Note: When visitors load your website in their browser, cached replies are provided from the closest location to them.
InstaWP allows you to create a new SFTP/SSH user and utilize the following two connection types to establish a single sign-on for your live website without any login credentials of that user.
SSH Key Pair
Password
To use an SSH Key pair as a connection type, paste the SSH Public key that you generated on selecting the repository type as private to add a new deployment. For more information, refer to the Add Deployment document.
To use a password as a connection type for adding an SSH/SFTP user, enter the password.
After choosing a connection type for adding an SSH/SFTP user, click on the Add User button.
This will add a new SSH/SFTP user which allows you to access the website without any login credentials of the added user.
Now that your public key has been connected to the InstaWP live site, you may copy the SSH command and paste it into your terminal to get a password-less login.
Hit enter and then type yes to execute.
You can download the backup file for your hosted live site since InstaWP automatically creates a backup every day and stores a separate shadow copy of the site, updated in sync, in another region.
Note: If a primary datacenter pool encounters an issue, it immediately fails over to the site's secondary datacenter pool, keeping the site operational and backup safe.
Note: The user can manually backup their files and databases, which will only be created once. To manually generate a backup again, users must first delete the previous one.
You can map your website with a new domain name by linking it to a web-hosting server, such as Cloudflare or Namecheap.
Step 1: Enter a domain name.
Step 2: Copy the domain name that you have entered and both the "A" records IP addreses, as will be needed to paste on DNS records for mapping.
Step 3: Go to your domain register panel (such as Cloudflare or Namecheap) to add a new record.
Step 4: Paste the domain name and IP address to the relevant fields, then click on the Save button.
Note: The user can only paste one IP address for every DNS record. For second IP address, they need to add new record and paste the same domain name with it
Step 5: Click on the Map domain button to complete mapping.
For more information, refer to the Map Domain document.
This will complete your domain name mapping. You can refresh the page to see.
You can also delete your InstaWP live - hosted site when not in use anymore.
You can also use the following options, which are only accessible for your InstaWP Live hosted site.
View Logs
Clone
DB Editor
You can view different types of logs that are related to your InstaWP live hosted site such as PHP warning errors & web server related logs.
To access the logs, go to the Three dots and select View Logs from its dropdown list.
A new pop-up window will appear, providing you with the following types of logs:
You can clone your InstaWP live hosted site by creating a replica of your existing site with all the design, file system and database.
To access the Clone, go to the Three dots and select Clone from its dropdown list.
A new modal window will appear, prompting you to enter a domain name for cloning your hosted site.
After entering the name, click on the Clone button.
Another window will appear, asking you to confirm the action, by clicking on the Clone button.
This will clone your InstaWP Live hosted site, which you can view from your hosting page.
You can access your InstaWP Live site's database using phpMyAdmin, which provides a web interface for managing MySQL databases.
To access the DB Editor, go to the Three dots and select DB Editor from its dropdown list.
An phpMyAdmin (Database management tool) window will appear in a new tab for creating and managing the contents of databases.
InstaWP allows you to migrate your existing WP Staging site to the InstaWP Live site - managed WordPress Hosting with CDN, Security (WAF), and Backups in-built.
Note: The user needs to enable the beta program to get the latest features and updates including migrating the WP staging site to the InstawWP live site. For more information, refer to this document.
Step 1: Go to your dashboard and click on the Go Live icon corresponding to the WP site you want to migrate.
Step 2: Select the InstaWP Live option from the modal window to host a new site with InstaWP and click on the Next Step button.
Note: If the user doesn't have any pricing plan subscribed to, they need to add a credit or debit card to migrate their staging site to InstaWP live.
Step 3: The pricing plan page will appear. Select a Pricing plan based on your preferences, and can optionally use the Pricing Calculator to minimise pricing on purchasing more sites. For more information, visit here.
Step 4: After selecting your preferred pricing plan, click on the Next Step button.
Step 5: Configure website settings by defining the values (as described in the table below). Once done, click the Next Step button.
Step 6: A modal window for Plugins & Themes will appear, allowing you to select themes and plugins from the available categories:
- Popular
- Security
- SEO
- Social Media
- Speed
- Forms
- Backups
- Page Builders
- Marketing
- Utility
- eCommerce
- Translation
After selecting plugins & themes according to your preferences, click the Go Live button.
Step 7: Click on the Cotinue button in the modal window to proceed further.
This will complete your migration from the staging site to the live site.
Note: This WordPress live site will have the InstaWP Connect plugin installed, allowing you to auto-login the WP Admin panel or create staging sites and host them on your InstaWP cloud servers. For more information, refer to this document.
View the InstaWP Live subscription for hosted sites by following the steps outlined below.
Step 1: Click on the Profile icon from the top-right corner and select the Subscription option from the dropdown menu.
Step 2: Select the InstaWP Live option from the Plan & Billing dropdown list.
This will redirect you to the Hosting subscription page.
Here, you can view your InstaWP Live subscription for hosted sites such as usage, bill date, or total hosted sites under subscription.
With InstaWP Live sites, you can now set a custom CPU and Disk count based on your site's requirements.
To configure this, navigate to the Settings of your live site, go to the Plan & Addons section, and adjust the CPU and Disk count as needed. This feature allows you to optimize your site’s performance by allocating additional resources.
Upgrading CPU and Disk count is particularly useful when you expect a surge in traffic, such as during promotions, events, or heavy user activity. It ensures your site runs smoothly without performance bottlenecks, providing a seamless experience for your visitors.
Label Support for Hosted and Connected Sites to help you easily identify and organize your sites.
This feature allows you to assign custom labels to differentiate between hosted and connected sites in your InstaWP dashboard.
With labels, you can streamline your workflow by categorizing sites based on their purpose, status, or any criteria that suits your needs. For example, label sites as “Development,” “Staging,” or “Production” to quickly locate and manage them.**
InstaWP enables you to scale up your agency's WaaS (Website as a Service) on its Live server, allowing you to offer a pre-templated website under the InstaWP live hosting plan to public users. The creation of a WaaS involves the following steps:
Step 1: Create a new WordPress site, if you have already created one then save it as a shared template.
Step 2: Once the shared template is set up, you can monetize that shared template.
Step 3: Once monetize shared template is set up, you can connect InstaWP Live hosting.
Step 4: Once hosting is connected, now you can create your WaaS and select InstaWP Live as the hosting partner. For more information, refer to the Create WaaS document.
💡 Did you know - You can migrate your existing staging site to external services such are Runcloud, and ServerAvatar hosting partners. Learn about External services.
You can choose from different pricing plans and those plans typically include services such as CPU, server space, bandwidth, and other resources. This service takes care of providing and managing the hosting infrastructure for users. This simplifies the user experience, as they don't need to handle the technical aspects of hosting like managing servers etc.
In this documentation, we will explore the steps to:
Create InstaWP Live Hosted Site
Manage Live Hosted Site
Connect Settings
Hosting Settings
→ Dashboard
→ SFTP SSH
→ Backup
→ Map Domain
→ Delete
→ View Logs
→ Clone
→ DB Editor
Migrate WP Site to Live Site
View Hosting Subscription
Create New WaaS
Let’s get started 🚀
Create InstaWP Live Hosted Site
Step 1: Sign in to your InstaWP account to access the dashboard and click on the Hosting button from the top navigation bar.
Step 2: You will be redirected to the hosting page. Click on the + New Site button from the top right corner of the interface.
Step 3: Select the InstaWP Live option from the modal window to host a new site with InstaWP and click on the Next Step button.
Step 4: The pricing plan page will appear. Select a Pricing plan based on your preferences, and can optionally use the Pricing Calculator to minimise pricing on purchasing more sites. For more information, visit here.
Step 5: After selecting your preferred pricing plan, click on the Next Step button.
Step 6: Configure website settings by defining the values (as described in the table below). Once done, click the Next Step button.
| Values | Description |
|---|---|
| Data center | This allows you to select different data centers from Burbank, Washington, Dallas (US) & Amsterdam (NL). |
| PHP version | This shows the current PHP version of your website, you can also change it according to your preference. |
| Domain name | Enter your new Domain name. |
If you have purchased our Whitelabel addon, you can use the domain such as sitename.yourdomain.com from this screen.
Step 7: A modal window for Plugins & Themes will appear, allowing you to select themes and plugins from the available categories:
→ Popular
→ Security
→ SEO
→ Social Media
→ Speed
→ Forms
→ Backups
→ Page Builders
→ Marketing
→ Utility
→ eCommerce
→ Translation
After selecting plugins & themes according to your preferences, click the Go Live button.
Step 8: Click on the Yes button in the modal window to proceed further.
This will create your new WordPress Live site alongside the URL and login credentials.
Note: This WordPress live site will have the InstaWP Connect plugin installed, allowing you to auto-login the WP Admin panel or create staging sites and host them on your InstaWP cloud servers. For more information, refer to this document.
Manage Live Hosted Site
Once connected, manage your newly created InstaWP Live hosted site by configuring the options from the following settings:
Connect Settings
Hosting Settings
Connect Settings
You can choose the Purge cache option to free up server resources, making your connected site function faster and more efficiently, particularly in terms of a site's Time to First Byte (TTFB), by serving pages and static cache directly from the closest server available to visitors.
Hosting Settings
You can configure the following options that are available on the hosting settings:
Dashboard
SFTP SSH
Backup
Map Domain
Delete
Dashboard
You can view your InstaWP Live - hosted website’s space & cores used with basic information such as PHP, WordPress version, or database size.
Note: The user can also change their PHP and WordPress version on their InstaWP Live Hosted Site.
You can also use the Edge Caching feature that saves your page cache (which is only stored in your site's server center) to any of the operated data centers worldwide such as: Dallas, San Jose, Ashburn, Seattle, Miami, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, New York (US), Toronto (CA) Singapore, Sao Paolo, (BR), London (UK), Vienna, Sydney (AU), Hong Kong (CHN), Stockholm (SE) Madrid (ESP), Paris (FR), Frankfurt (GER) Johannesburg (SA), Osaka (JP) & Mumbai (IN).
Note: When visitors load your website in their browser, cached replies are provided from the closest location to them.
SFTP SSH
InstaWP allows you to create a new SFTP/SSH user and utilize the following two connection types to establish a single sign-on for your live website without any login credentials of that user.
SSH Key Pair
Password
SSH Key Pair
To use an SSH Key pair as a connection type, paste the SSH Public key that you generated on selecting the repository type as private to add a new deployment. For more information, refer to the Add Deployment document.
Password
To use a password as a connection type for adding an SSH/SFTP user, enter the password.
After choosing a connection type for adding an SSH/SFTP user, click on the Add User button.
This will add a new SSH/SFTP user which allows you to access the website without any login credentials of the added user.
Now that your public key has been connected to the InstaWP live site, you may copy the SSH command and paste it into your terminal to get a password-less login.
Hit enter and then type yes to execute.
Backup
You can download the backup file for your hosted live site since InstaWP automatically creates a backup every day and stores a separate shadow copy of the site, updated in sync, in another region.
Note: If a primary datacenter pool encounters an issue, it immediately fails over to the site's secondary datacenter pool, keeping the site operational and backup safe.
Note: The user can manually backup their files and databases, which will only be created once. To manually generate a backup again, users must first delete the previous one.
Map Domain
You can map your website with a new domain name by linking it to a web-hosting server, such as Cloudflare or Namecheap.
Step 1: Enter a domain name.
Step 2: Copy the domain name that you have entered and both the "A" records IP addreses, as will be needed to paste on DNS records for mapping.
Step 3: Go to your domain register panel (such as Cloudflare or Namecheap) to add a new record.
Step 4: Paste the domain name and IP address to the relevant fields, then click on the Save button.
Note: The user can only paste one IP address for every DNS record. For second IP address, they need to add new record and paste the same domain name with it
Step 5: Click on the Map domain button to complete mapping.
For more information, refer to the Map Domain document.
This will complete your domain name mapping. You can refresh the page to see.
Delete
You can also delete your InstaWP live - hosted site when not in use anymore.
You can also use the following options, which are only accessible for your InstaWP Live hosted site.
View Logs
Clone
DB Editor
View Logs
You can view different types of logs that are related to your InstaWP live hosted site such as PHP warning errors & web server related logs.
To access the logs, go to the Three dots and select View Logs from its dropdown list.
A new pop-up window will appear, providing you with the following types of logs:
| Types of logs | Description |
|---|---|
| Error Log | Shows the PHP related error logs for the InstaWP live hosted site. Errors such as PHP warnings indicating that the scandir() function encountered an issue because it couldn't find the specified directory. |
| Access Log | Shows web server logs that clients may use to provide insights to their end users and support team. These log entries contains information regarding a request sent to a server, such as the client, the request itself, and the server's response. |
Clone
You can clone your InstaWP live hosted site by creating a replica of your existing site with all the design, file system and database.
To access the Clone, go to the Three dots and select Clone from its dropdown list.
A new modal window will appear, prompting you to enter a domain name for cloning your hosted site.
After entering the name, click on the Clone button.
Another window will appear, asking you to confirm the action, by clicking on the Clone button.
This will clone your InstaWP Live hosted site, which you can view from your hosting page.
DB Editor
You can access your InstaWP Live site's database using phpMyAdmin, which provides a web interface for managing MySQL databases.
To access the DB Editor, go to the Three dots and select DB Editor from its dropdown list.
An phpMyAdmin (Database management tool) window will appear in a new tab for creating and managing the contents of databases.
Migrate WP site to Live site
InstaWP allows you to migrate your existing WP Staging site to the InstaWP Live site - managed WordPress Hosting with CDN, Security (WAF), and Backups in-built.
Note: The user needs to enable the beta program to get the latest features and updates including migrating the WP staging site to the InstawWP live site. For more information, refer to this document.
Step 1: Go to your dashboard and click on the Go Live icon corresponding to the WP site you want to migrate.
Step 2: Select the InstaWP Live option from the modal window to host a new site with InstaWP and click on the Next Step button.
Note: If the user doesn't have any pricing plan subscribed to, they need to add a credit or debit card to migrate their staging site to InstaWP live.
Step 3: The pricing plan page will appear. Select a Pricing plan based on your preferences, and can optionally use the Pricing Calculator to minimise pricing on purchasing more sites. For more information, visit here.
Step 4: After selecting your preferred pricing plan, click on the Next Step button.
Step 5: Configure website settings by defining the values (as described in the table below). Once done, click the Next Step button.
| Values | Description |
|---|---|
| Data center | This allows you to select different data centers from Burbank, Washington, Dallas (US) & Amsterdam (NL). |
| PHP version | This shows the current PHP version of your website, you can also change it according to your preference. |
| Domain name | Enter your new Domain name. |
Step 6: A modal window for Plugins & Themes will appear, allowing you to select themes and plugins from the available categories:
- Popular
- Security
- SEO
- Social Media
- Speed
- Forms
- Backups
- Page Builders
- Marketing
- Utility
- eCommerce
- Translation
After selecting plugins & themes according to your preferences, click the Go Live button.
Step 7: Click on the Cotinue button in the modal window to proceed further.
This will complete your migration from the staging site to the live site.
Note: This WordPress live site will have the InstaWP Connect plugin installed, allowing you to auto-login the WP Admin panel or create staging sites and host them on your InstaWP cloud servers. For more information, refer to this document.
View Hosting Subscription
View the InstaWP Live subscription for hosted sites by following the steps outlined below.
Step 1: Click on the Profile icon from the top-right corner and select the Subscription option from the dropdown menu.
Step 2: Select the InstaWP Live option from the Plan & Billing dropdown list.
This will redirect you to the Hosting subscription page.
Here, you can view your InstaWP Live subscription for hosted sites such as usage, bill date, or total hosted sites under subscription.
Set Custom CPU and Disk Count for Your Hosted Site
With InstaWP Live sites, you can now set a custom CPU and Disk count based on your site's requirements.
To configure this, navigate to the Settings of your live site, go to the Plan & Addons section, and adjust the CPU and Disk count as needed. This feature allows you to optimize your site’s performance by allocating additional resources.
Upgrading CPU and Disk count is particularly useful when you expect a surge in traffic, such as during promotions, events, or heavy user activity. It ensures your site runs smoothly without performance bottlenecks, providing a seamless experience for your visitors.
Label Support for Hosted and Connected Sites
Label Support for Hosted and Connected Sites to help you easily identify and organize your sites.
This feature allows you to assign custom labels to differentiate between hosted and connected sites in your InstaWP dashboard.
With labels, you can streamline your workflow by categorizing sites based on their purpose, status, or any criteria that suits your needs. For example, label sites as “Development,” “Staging,” or “Production” to quickly locate and manage them.**
Create a New WaaS
InstaWP enables you to scale up your agency's WaaS (Website as a Service) on its Live server, allowing you to offer a pre-templated website under the InstaWP live hosting plan to public users. The creation of a WaaS involves the following steps:
Step 1: Create a new WordPress site, if you have already created one then save it as a shared template.
Step 2: Once the shared template is set up, you can monetize that shared template.
Step 3: Once monetize shared template is set up, you can connect InstaWP Live hosting.
Step 4: Once hosting is connected, now you can create your WaaS and select InstaWP Live as the hosting partner. For more information, refer to the Create WaaS document.
💡 Did you know - You can migrate your existing staging site to external services such are Runcloud, and ServerAvatar hosting partners. Learn about External services.
Updated on: 05/12/2024
Thank you!