For example, if you’re thinking of installing a plugin on a WordPress project, you’ll likely want to confirm that it doesn’t create any compatibility issues with other themes and add-ons. With a staging site, you have an identical environment as your main project, so you can test if everything works fine before pushing the new plugin to production.

Let’s have a look at the different options for creating a staging environment.

Creating a Staging Site Using WP Staging Plugin

As is usually the case, if you use WordPress, you can rely on the enormous pool of plugins. The WP staging plugin creates a clone website with a copy of your database on a subfolder of the main WordPress installation.

Here’s what you need to do.

Install WP Staging on your WordPress

The first thing to do is install and activate the WordPress Staging plugin if you haven’t already. The steps below will take you through it.

1. Go to Plugins on your WordPress Dashboard.

2. Click Add New.

3. Go to the search box on the top right of the page and type in “WP Staging.”

4. Once you find WP Staging, click on Install Now.

5. Hit the Activate button.

Run WP Staging plugin on WordPress

The following steps will teach you how to begin the cloning process.

6. You’ll see WP Staging Pro features on the next page. Click “Skip – Start Cloning” at the bottom to begin the cloning process.

7. Next, Click on Create new staging site.

8. In the following step, name your new staging site and hit the Start Cloning button.

Depending on the size of your website’s database, the cloning process might take a while. 

9. After cloning, click Open staging site (login with your admin credentials) at the bottom of the page.

10. The following page will deny you access. Login with your Username and Password to gain access.

11. Type in your login details appropriately, and hit the Login button as shown below to access your cloned site.

Once you’re in, you’re good to go.  Your new staging site is a perfect replica of your main site, but for a few differences like the unique URL and orange-colored tab at the top.

The second way to create a staging site is manually. You might find it difficult to manually create a clone site if you have little to zero knowledge about programming, databases, and working with the phpMyAdmin.  A lot could go wrong, and you might end up with a crashed site.

A WP plugin can certainly remove a lot of the dangers of doing everything on your own. However, if you’re a ScalaHosting customer, it’s not the only way of setting up a staging environment.

Creating a Staging Site via SWordPress Manager

If you use one of ScalaHosting’s SPanel managed VPS plans, you have an even easier way of creating a staging environment for your WordPress project. The unique SWordPress manager is equipped with this sort of functionality, and we’ll now show you just how easy it is to take advantage of it.

Here are the steps:

1. Log into SPanel’s User Interface.

The default login URL is https://yourdomain.com/spanel/ (don’t forget to replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain).

2. Open the SWordPress Manager.

The SWordPress Manager is available under the Tools section on SPanel’s homepage.

3. Open the Actions menu and select Clone.

At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a list of all the active WordPress installations currently on your account. Next to each of them, you have an Actions drop-down menu. Open it and select Clone.

4. Set the staging environment’s URL.

SPanel will ask you to enter the clone installation’s URL. You can either set it as a subfolder of your primary domain or you can use an addon domain or a subdomain. When you’re ready, click Clone.

SWordPress will automatically copy the installation’s files in the new location and will clone the databases. You’ll have a carbon copy of the main installation with the same themes, plugins, users, and content.

Creating a Staging Environment for a Non-WP Site

Cloning a WordPress site is easy because you’ve got plenty of tools that can automate the process for you. However, if you have a custom website or use another CMS, these tools may not be at your disposal. If that’s the case, you’ll need to manually clone your website.

It’s nowhere near as easy as using a plugin or another automated tool, but it’s not exactly difficult, either. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Copy your site’s files and paste them in the clone site’s location.

Because FTP clients like FileZilla present some limitations when it comes to copying files on the server, it’s best to use your web hosting control panel’s File Manager. Navigate to your site’s files, select all files and folders, and use the Copy button to save them in the server’s clipboard.

2. Create the staging folder.

You’ll need to paste the files in the staging directory. If you’re going to use a subfolder (e.g., yourdomain.com/stage), you can create the folder from the file manager. If you want to host the clone under a subdomain (e.g., dev.yourdomain.com), you need to set up a subdomain and keep note of its document root.

3. Paste the files and folders into the new folder.

The time you’ll need to wait for the transfer to complete depends on your site’s size and the server’s hardware resources.

4. Export your site’s data.

With the files copied, it’s time to clone your site’s database as well. It’s important to create a separate database for the clone site, as that way, you’ll ensure that any changes you make to the staging site won’t affect the production environment.

To export your site’s database, you need to open phpMyAdmin, select the correct database, and go to Export. You can use the quick settings and save the data to your local computer as an SQL file.

5. Create a new MySQL database and user.

You next need to create an empty database into which you’ll import your site’s data. A MySQL user is also required so your staging website can communicate with it.

SPanel users can create a database and user via the MySQL databases tool available on the User Interface’s homepage.

6. Import your site’s data into the new database.

You now need to go back to phpMyAdmin, select the new database, and go to the Import tab. The interface shows you a variety of different options and explains in detail what each of them works. In most cases, however, you simply need to click the Choose File button and select the SQL file you exported earlier.

7. Configure the staging site to work with your new database.

Finally, you need to tell the clone site which database to work with. How you’re going to go about this depends on how your website is built. Most likely, you’ll need to edit a configuration file, though in some cases, you might also need to modify some entries in the database to make the clone site work with its URL.

It is a free-to-use software that provides the stability, reliability, and security required for an effective database management system. This article provides a walkthrough process of creating or deleting a MySQL database or user.

How To Create A MySQL Database

To create a MySQL Database, use the following steps:

Login to your Control Panel

Go to the Databases section. You can type in the keyword ‘database’ for an accessible location.

Click on MySQL Databases

Give your new database a name.

Click on the Create Database button.,

If you created your database successfully, a success message would be displayed. It will also add your new database will also be added to the list of existing databases.

How To Delete A MySQL Database

To delete a MySQL Database:

Go to the Existing Databases section

Click the Delete button for the exact database you wish to delete

A confirmation box will pop up. Click on the YES button to confirm the delete action.

By doing this, you will successfully delete your database. 

Creating A MySQL Database User

We create a MySQL database to provide additional security and authentication for your website’s database. The user is assigned a login username and password, which differs from the Windows login credentials and the cPanel. 

Before any user, aside from the website owner, accesses a database, it would request the registered login credentials to validate its authenticity. 

How To Create A MySQL Database User

To create a new MySQL Database User, follow these steps:

1. Login to your cPanel account

Go to the Databases section. You can type in the keyword ‘database’ for an accessible location. Click on MySQL Databases

2. Scroll to the New MySQL User section, Type in the Username, Password and Repeat the Password

3. Click on the Create User button.

You have successfully created a new MySQL database user. This user account differs from that of a web and mail administrator account.

How To Delete A MySQL Database User

When you wish to delete a database user:

Go to the Existing MySQL Users section and select the Username you wish to delete

Click the Delete button

Define User’s Privileges

Now that you have successfully created a new user account, it is vital to assign user privileges to determine the user’s control level over the database. As a website owner, you do not want to grant full database access to just anyone.

Assign Database User Privileges

To assign privileges to a database user, follow these steps:

Login to your cPanel account

Go to the Databases section. You can type in the keyword ‘database’ for an accessible location. Click on MySQL Databases

Scroll to the Grant Access To Database section

Select the user you would like to assign database privileges to and select the specific database assigned to the user.

Click on Add user to database

You have successfully assigned privileges to a database user.

Conclusion

By following the step-by-step processes outlined in this article you have learned how to create and delete databases. 

You have also learned how to create MySQL database users and assign user privileges. 

If you encountered any hitches while setting up any of this processes, please leave a comment below and we would be happy to help out.

Table of contents:

• What is SShield?
• How does SShield work?
• How can you control SShield?
• Conclusion

Many of the people launching new websites today don’t have much experience with computers. They often don’t really know much about the challenges of securing a website, and as a result, their online business is often easy prey for cybercriminals. When they do get attacked, they don’t know what to do, and the cost of getting a specialist to fix the problem is often overwhelming. All this could spell the end for the entire project.

At ScalaHosting, we understand how frustrating this experience might be, which is why we’ve developed SShield.

What is SShield?

SShield is our proprietary security system that is integrated into SPanel and is available free of charge to all ScalaHosting customers who have picked one of our shared or managed cloud VPS hosting solutions. It constantly monitors the websites hosted on your account, and it successfully blocks 99.998% of all attacks.

The built-in Artificial Intelligence (AI) scans through all the processes on your websites, and if it detects any malicious behavior, it alerts you immediately. It works 24/7/365, and it’s completely automated.

How does SShield work?

Traditional security solutions rely on a signature-based system to detect malware. This approach is centered around a huge database full of known malware hashes (or signatures). If the security product spots a file on your computer or server with a signature that is available in its database, it flags it as malicious and blocks it. 

Security companies work hard to keep these databases as up-to-date as possible, but the number of threats that emerge every day is so huge that such a list can never really be considered complete.

SShield’s approach is different. Instead of a large database of hashes, it uses AI to look for any malicious processes that might be running on the server. This increases the chances of catching a new malware strain that has not yet been added to the databases of signatures, and SShield has proven that it successfully blocks almost all online attacks.

In addition to this, when it does detect malicious code on your website, it analyzes it, gathers all the information it needs about it, and sends you a detailed report on what has happened and what you need to do to fix it. SShield also gives you time to take the necessary precautions.

Most hosting providers suspend compromised accounts immediately after detecting malicious activity. The speed with which SShield catches the attack, however, and the fact that it can tell the website owner exactly what happened, means that we can let our customers fix the issue within reasonable time limits without causing any downtime. What’s more, once the malware has been removed, SShield will continue monitoring the website to ensure that the security vulnerability has been closed.

How can you control SShield?

The great thing about SShield is that it’s 100% automated. Customers who have opted for one of our managed cloud VPS hosting solutions can ensure that the service is running on their server. To do that, they need to log into their SPanel and click Server Status.

If everything is alright, you should be able to see the green checkmark next to SShield. If it isn’t, you can always get in touch with our technical support team who will look into the matter immediately.

Apart from that, there’s nothing you need to do. The service is automatically enabled for all websites hosted on your account, and it works in the background, letting you focus on your day-to-day tasks.

Conclusion

Launching a new website is about a lot more than just creating a good-looking design and adding some content. It’s a complicated process, and there are quite a few things you need to think about. Security is one of the most important aspects, but unfortunately, far too many people simply don’t know how to tackle it, and this often leads to a frustrating experience.

Thanks to its unique method for monitoring websites and detecting malicious activity, SShield gives both inexperienced users and trained developers the peace of mind they need.

Although it wasn’t the first CMS in the world, WordPress proved to be one of the most versatile and easy-to-use platforms of its kind, and, partly thanks to the fact that it’s free, people quickly adopted it. Despite the appearance of numerous point-and-click website builders, its popularity hasn’t dwindled, and it’s still considered the go-to solution for anyone trying to launch a new project. Unfortunately, its ease of use is also causing some problems.

Table of Contents

• What is SWordPress?
• Installing WordPress with SWordPress
• Configuring automatic updates and Security Lock
• Cloning, deleting, and changing passwords of WordPress installations with SWordPress
• Conclusion

Inexperienced website administrators overlook some important factors when working with WordPress, and even the seasoned developers don’t always bother with vital aspects of the platform’s configuration. As a result, many online businesses suffer from performance issues and cyberattacks. Manually installing and properly configuring WordPress can indeed be tricky. Fortunately, ScalaHosting customers can take advantage of our SWordPress Manager.

What is SWordPress?

SWordPress is a WordPress management tool that is integrated into SPanel and is available free of charge to anyone who picks one of ScalaHosting’s managed cloud VPS hosting solutions. It can install WordPress on your account, and it can also help you configure and secure it properly.

Managing content with WordPress might be an easy task, but getting the platform going in the first place normally requires a certain level of expertise. With SWordPress, however, you simply need to pick the location and login credentials, and your installation will be ready in seconds. SWordPress is far from just an installer, though.

Running up-to-date software is something far too many people have problems with, and this includes WordPress users. Thousands of WordPress websites run on versions of the platform that don’t perform as well as they should and are riddled with security holes. SWordPress gives you an easy way of enabling automatic updates and ensuring that your website runs smoothly and is secure.

This, along with a few other unique features, make SWordPress a brilliant tool for managing your entire WordPress installation. Let’s see how it works.

Installing WordPress with SWordPress

To install a WordPress site using SWordPress, you need to log into your account’s SPanel and go to WordPress Manager. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a list of all existing WordPress installations, and above it is the form for creating a new one.

First, you need to choose where you’d like to install WordPress. From the drop-down menu, you can pick your main domain name, one of your addon domains, or a subdomain. If you want to install WordPress in a subfolder (e.g., domain.com/blog), you can specify this in the Folder name field.

After you’ve set the correct location, you need to pick the username and password for the WordPress administrator. The security of the entire website could be dependent on the complexity of the password, which is why SWordPress won’t let you continue with the installation unless the password is at least eight characters long and contains at least one letter, one digit, and one symbol.

To help you pick a truly unique password, SWordPress comes with an integrated password generator that you can use. Finally, you need to fill in the administrator’s email address. When you’re ready, click Install WordPress to initiate the process, and in a few seconds’ time, you should be able to see the new installation in the list at the bottom of the page.

Configuring automatic updates and Security Lock

Your WordPress installation is now ready, and you can log in and start managing your website. Before you do, however, you might want to take a look at a couple of toggle switches located next to your new WordPress installation.

One of them is labeled Auto Updates, and it’s switched on by default. Leaving it enabled is strongly recommended. This will ensure that not only WordPress itself, but also the plugins and themes you install later on will be updated without any action from your end. This way, all new features and performance improvements will be available on your WordPress installation, and you’ll also be sure that newly released security patches are installed in a timely manner.

The other toggle switch controls a feature called Security Lock. When it’s turned on, it limits access to your website’s files and directories. As a result, even if hackers manage to exploit a security vulnerability, they won’t be able to infect the website with malware. Meanwhile, you will be able to manage and upload new content without any difficulties.

Security Lock is a unique feature that takes your website’s security up a notch. The way it works, however, prevents you from installing new plugins and themes while it’s on. We realize that after you create a fresh WordPress installation, you will likely want to customize it, which is why Security Lock is turned off by default. We recommend enabling it as soon as you’re done setting up your website.

If Auto Updates and Security Lock are switched on, and there are new updates, SWordPress will automatically pause the Security Lock feature and will re-enable it as soon as the updates are applied.

Cloning, deleting, and changing the password of WordPress installations with SWordPress

Next to the Auto Updates and Security Lock toggles, you’ll see a drop-down menu that gives you yet more options for managing your WordPress installation.

If you feel that you need to change the password of the WordPress administrator, you can do it from here. You don’t need to know the old password, which ensures that even if you give another person administrative access to your website, you will still retain some control over it. Once again, you can use the built-in password generator to ensure that the new password is complex and unique.

The Actions drop-down menu also gives you the chance to Clone your WordPress installation. You can choose a path on your account (one of your domains, a subdomain, or a subfolder), and you can replicate the entire WordPress website, along with all the modifications you’ve made to it and all the content you’ve uploaded. This is especially useful if you’re developing a new version of your website in a hidden folder or a subdomain. Instead of arduous copy-pasting and re-configuring, once you’re ready with the new version, you can simply clone the entire WordPress installation on your live domain and deploy the new look in mere minutes.

If, on the other hand, you’re not happy with the way things are going, you can also delete your WordPress website with a couple of clicks. What you need to do is pick Uninstall from the Actions drop-down menu and then confirm that you really want to delete the website.

Conclusion

WordPress may be pretty intuitive to work with, but certain aspects of its installation and configuration might present a challenge without additional help. With the tools provided by SWordPress, you will be able to focus on your business while knowing that your website is properly configured and secured.

Table of contents

• What is SPanel?
• Using SPanel to manage websites
  • Managing your domains with SPanel
  • Managing emails with SPanel
  • Managing files with SPanel
  • Managing databases with SPanel
  • Additional tools
• Using SPanel to manage a cloud VPS
  • Managing your virtual server with SPanel
  • Managing accounts with SPanel
• Conclusion

What is SPanel?

SPanel is our proprietary management system through which you will control virtually all aspects of your hosting account. It’s available completely free of charge for all clients who pick one of our managed cloud VPS hosting solutions, and although it’s not the first control panel of its kind, it comes with a few unique features that help you manage your Scala Hosting account quickly, easily, and securely.

For website administrators, SPanel is an easy way of performing a variety of different tasks, including:

• Creating and managing subdomains
• Adding addon domains
• Controlling DNS settings
• Creating and managing FTP accounts
• Uploading and managing files
• Creating and restoring backups
• Creating and managing email accounts
• Managing databases
• Installing SSL certificates
• Installing and configuring WordPress
• Creating and configuring cron jobs

Users who pick one of our managed VPS hosting solutions also get to control their entire cloud server through SPanel’s interface: They can:

• Monitor their server’s health
• Get stats on CPU, RAM, and disk space usage
• Create, suspend, and terminate accounts
• Manage disk quotas, usernames, and main domains for individual accounts

By default, the SPanel login URL can be found at https://[yourdomain]/spanel. What you see when you sign in depends on the credentials you’re using. If you use the username and password for your cloud server, you’ll see SPanel’s server administration tools. If, on the other hand, you need to manage a website, you need to use the credentials for the account associated with that website.

Using SPanel to manage websites

Years ago, people realized that website administration needn’t be difficult, and since then, we’ve seen a lot of innovations that have let less tech-savvy users establish their own internet presence. SPanel is proof that maintaining a website could be even easier than you might think.

After you log in, you can immediately see general information about your hosting account and current resource usage. The different tools are grouped together in panels, and you can rearrange them however you like. Virtually all the tasks are point-and-click, and there are plenty of help boxes that give you information on what you’re looking at.

Managing your domains with SPanel

A website can’t function without a domain name. After you activate your hosting account, you will receive a welcome email with instructions on which nameservers you need to point your domain(s) to. Once you’ve done that, you can use SPanel to ensure that your visitors have access to the right content. With it, you can also host more than one website on a single account.

Your account is associated with a single main domain name, but you can add as many addon domains as you want and host different websites under them. What you need to do is open the Addon domains tool, enter the domain name, and point it to a directory within the root folder of your account. Then, you need to make sure that the right content is stored in the said directory and that the addon domain’s nameservers are correctly set.

SPanel also helps you create Subdomains both for your main domain name and for your addon domains. With them, you can create different sections of your websites (shop.yourdomain.com, blog.yourdomain.com, etc.) and keep the structure well-organized.

Thanks to the Redirects tool, you can set up and manage permanent and temporary redirects for your domains and URLs without the need to edit the .htaccess file.

Through the DNS editor tool, you can further control what users see when they enter your domains in their address bar. The A, MX, CNAME, and TXT records you add through it let you point visitors of your domains and subdomains to specific IPs, and it also helps you ensure that your emails arrive wherever you want them to.

Managing emails with SPanel

One of the first things people do after they launch their websites is to configure the email inboxes associated with their domains, and this is not really that surprising. After all, regardless of whether you’re running a small personal website or an online business, you must make sure that users are able to reach you.

By clicking Email accounts, you will be able to manage all email accounts associated with your domain. Creating new inboxes is as easy as choosing a username and picking a password, and you can later manage them from the same place. The Autoresponders, Forwarders, and Default address features let you configure the way different emails are handled. People who use a third-party email service provider need to set their mail exchanger to “Remote” through the Mail route tool. Setting up your business email to work with Gmail, for example, takes no more than a few clicks. If you decide to keep your communication on ScalaHosting’s servers, you could do worse than enable the SpamAssassin feature minimizes the amount of spam that reaches your inbox. You can also set up your own custom filters that will discard messages you don’t want to see.

Managing files with SPanel

SPanel’s File manager is perhaps the simplest, most intuitive way of handling your website’s files. Uploading files is a drag-and-drop process, and downloading them is not much harder. You can create new folders, change permissions, and even edit files on the spot. If you need to process a larger amount of information, however, you’re better off using FTP.

With SPanel, you can create as many FTP accounts as you want and manage your website’s data through your favorite FTP client. Meanwhile, the Backup and Restore backup tools in SPanel’s Files section help you fix any issues that might arise. Through the Files section, you can also get detailed stats on how much storage space you’re using.

Managing databases with SPanel

An FTP account and/or a web-based interface would be more than enough to manage the static websites from years gone by. Modern online projects tend to be much more complicated, however, and in addition to simple files, they also need databases in order to work correctly. Thankfully, SPanel can once again ease the process of handling all this information.

Through the MySQL databases tool in SPanel’s Databases section, you can create new MySQL databases, establish accounts for managing them, and set all the permissions for the individual accounts and databases.

Managing the actual data happens through phpMyAdmin – a free, open-source administration platform for MySQL and MariaDB databases. Its usability has made phpMyAdmin extremely popular with users and hosting companies, which is why it is integrated into SPanel.

Additional tools

SPanel can be as useful to the technically advanced users as it is to the beginners. For example, people looking to create a WordPress website will find our very own SWordPress manager extremely useful. It lets them install the world’s most popular Content Management System (CMS) and turn on the all-important automatic updates with no more than a couple of clicks. Once everything is up and running, SWordPress lets users enable a security feature called Security Lock, which ensures that even if hackers manage to break in, they won’t be able to tamper with the website’s files.

If you don’t want to use WordPress, you can use the Softaculous auto-installer to set up one of around 400 other website-building applications with no more than a few clicks.

Less experienced website administrators will also be happy to learn that securing the connection between a website and end users isn’t as difficult or as expensive as it used to be. In fact, through SPanel’s SSL certificates tool, you can configure your website to run through HTTPS in no time. If you don’t have an SSL certificate of your own, SPanel will automatically install and configure one within 24 hours of you pointing your domain to the correct nameservers.

Meanwhile, the more technically advanced among you can use SPanel to create Cron jobs, pick the correct PHP version, or edit the PHP.ini file.

Using SPanel to manage a cloud VPS

The world is moving towards cloud hosting at a rapid rate. The costs associated with this type of hosting are nowhere near as big as they used to be, and the improved scalability along with the rest of the benefits render the traditional solutions unsuitable for most modern websites. The only thing stopping some people is the misconception that controlling an entire server (albeit a virtual one) requires a lot of technical expertise. If you pick a managed cloud VPS hosting plan from Scala Hosting, however, you’ll quickly realize that this is not really the case.

For one, our managed VPS solutions come with an operating system and everything needed to run a website already installed, and if you do need assistance, our technical support team is always on hand to help you out. Last, but by no means least, you get free access to SPanel’s Admin Interface and all the tools you need to control your virtual server.

The home page of SPanel’s Admin Interface acts as a dashboard. Through it, you get a live feed of how much server resources you’re using at the moment, and you also have a list of all the accounts currently set up on your VPS. The server administration tools are available in the panel on the left-hand side of the screen, and if you’re struggling to find what you’re looking for, you can use the search functionality.

Managing your virtual server with SPanel

The first set of features revolve around the management of your server. In Server Information, you can get a more detailed picture of how your server is used. Once again, you can see what portion of your server resources are in use at the moment, but you also get more details, including information on the type of operating system it runs on.

Through the Server Settings page, you can control two-factor authentication and CAPTCHA for the different user groups and boost your server’s security, and the Branding and Packages sections let resellers use their VPS to grow their hosting business.

The Server Status page gives you information on all the services currently running on your VPS, and if there’s a problem with any of them, you can restart them from the Restart Service section. If that doesn’t work, you can reboot the entire system through the Restart Server tool. The Resource Usage section gives you detailed day-by-day stats on how much load you’re putting on your server, 

If more than one person needs to manage the server, you can create additional Admin accounts, and you can use the API tokens to integrate SPanel with other third-party products and applications.

Managing accounts with SPanel

The Accounts Management section lets you control who can access your virtual server and how. Creating a new user account is as easy as entering the account’s main domain name, picking a username and a password, and setting the limits on disk space, inodes, databases, addon domains, and email accounts.

All the accounts you’ve created are available in the Manage Accounts section, and you have plenty of other options for managing them. You can change their usernames, passwords, and main domains, you can let them access their data via SSH, and you can also modify their allocated server resources. 

Should the need arise, you can suspend, unsuspend, and terminate accounts with no more than a couple of clicks. SPanel also lets you see a list of all SQL services currently running on your VPS. You can control your VPS’ Softaculous license via the SPanel’s Admin Interface, and you can also change the web server for better performance.

Conclusion

The internet has changed a lot over the years. Websites are now much bigger and a lot more complicated than they used to be, and they are no longer exclusively created by computer specialists. The challenge of ensuring that they can all be reliably hosted and controlled by less experienced users is enormous, but we can proudly say that SPanel proves that nothing is impossible.