Copyright & Plagiarism Consultancy Firm Moved 18-Year-Old PlagiarismToday.com Having a Database of 5400+ Articles With Cloudways Migration

About Plagiarism Today

Jonathan Bailey, the founder of PlagiarismToday.com, has a background in journalism and became interested in plagiarism and copyright issues when he discovered his work being widely plagiarized online in 2000. In 2005, he launched PlagiarismToday.com to provide information and resources about plagiarism and copyright issues.

Over the years, PlagiarismToday.com has evolved to cover various plagiarism-related topics, including academic dishonesty, plagiarism of creative works, and copyright laws. As an old and large site with significant traffic spikes, hosting PlagiarismToday.com posed challenges in finding a suitable web hosting provider.

In this case study, Jonathan Bailey shares his experience migrating PlagiarismToday.com to Cloudways. He discusses his challenges with the site’s high CPU usage and garbage in the database and how Cloudways’ Support Team helped mitigate the issue. He also highlights the smooth WordPress migration process and improvements in the website performance.

Cloudways: Can you tell us about yourself and your background? How did you become interested in plagiarism and copyright issues?

Jonathan Bailey: Way (way) back in 2000, I was just a regular college student posting his work online. Though I had amassed a decent audience for the time, I was still very surprised to learn that my work was being widely plagiarized. I came from a journalism background, so I was familiar with media law but had little idea how to protect my work. I took a crash course on the subject and ended up handling over 700 cases of plagiarism of my work alone over the next 5 years. 

Cloudways: What inspired you to start PlagiarismToday.com? How has the website evolved over time?

Jonathan Bailey: In 2005, I was getting interested in blog reading, and my personal fight against plagiarism was still very active. I wanted to find a site that discussed that and provided useful information for me and others like me. However, that site didn’t exist. So, at the suggestion of my girlfriend, I launched the site in August 2005, and it grew very quickly.

From a quality content perspective, the site has really broadened and now talks about various plagiarism issues, including academic dishonesty, plagiarism of creative works, and the laws that govern such issues, most prominently copyright.

From a technical standpoint, the site is almost a perfect example of how WordPress has evolved over the years. When the site was launched, version 1.5 was the latest. The amount of change WordPress has gone through in that time is mind-blowing, as I’m pretty confident that 2005 me wouldn’t even recognize what I work with every day in 2023.

Cloudways: What factors did you consider when choosing a web hosting provider for PlagiarismToday.com? Why did you ultimately choose Cloudways?

Jonathan Bailey: PlagiarismToday.com is a somewhat unusual site. Day-to-day traffic levels are generally manageable, between 2-5K visitors daily. However, it’s a regular occurrence for big news stories to break, and PlagiarismToday.com suddenly gets hit with 10x or over 20x the normal traffic.

PlagiarismToday.com is also a very old and fairly large site. It has nearly 18 years of history, and as of this writing, it has over 5,484 articles in its database.

Those two elements combine to make PlagiarismToday.com a challenging site to host. It needs a powerful enough host to handle its size and age issues, enough overhead to handle significant traffic spikes, and affordable since the site doesn’t host ads or generate direct revenue.

I chose Cloudways because of its strong ties with WordPress and powerful plans at solid prices. I also liked that it offered strong caching built-in, which is crucial for dealing with traffic spikes, and was roundly recommended by many of my friends in the WordPress community.

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Cloudways: Have you experienced any issues or challenges with Cloudways? If so, how Cloudways helped you resolve them?

Jonathan Bailey: Right after completing the migration, there was an issue causing extremely high CPU usage on the site. The Cloudways’ Support Team helped identify what the issue was and mitigate the problem at the moment. I also worked with another Database Administrator (DBA) who, using insight provided by Cloudways’ team, was able to kill the issue for good.

These are the types of challenges you get with an 18-year-old site. There’s a lot of garbage in the database, and cleaning it out can be challenging. Two other hosts either failed to spot the problem or provide significant help.

Cloudways was able to find a way to stem the immediate problem, namely high CPU usage, enough so that I could have my friend, a Database Administrator (DBA), figure out the nature of the problem and fix it permanently. It was a collaborative effort, which I feel all hosting arrangements should be.

Cloudways: Could you describe your experience migrating PlagiarismToday.com on Cloudways? Was it a smooth process?

Jonathan Bailey: Migration was incredibly easy. I was nervous because, before Cloudways, I had been a CPanel user exclusively for over a decade. This was the first time I had attempted a non-CPanel to CPanel migration in many years.

However, the process was smooth. Aided with the Cloudways’ WordPress Migration Plugin, I could port over PlagiarismToday.com and 11 other (much smaller) sites I operate or help host. It was a very smooth process. It took only a few hours to do all the sites, most of which were waiting for transfers to complete.

I was especially happy with how easy it was to set up SSL on the sites. That’s an obvious requirement for any modern site, but it can be tricky and time-consuming. That was not the case with Cloudways.

Cloudways: You tweeted about the improvements you noticed in your website performance after migrating to Cloudways. Can you please tell us about it in detail?

Jonathan Bailey: Before Cloudways, I was actually fired by my previous hosting provider. Though they swore that they could handle the traffic and the size/age of the site, they really couldn’t. To make matters worse, the site had a database issue causing high CPU usage during updates, and they lacked the resources or capabilities to help diagnose on their end so that we could solve it.

Cloudways was an instant improvement. Not only was the server much more stout and able to deal with the issue without melting down, as I mentioned above, but your support also gave me the information I needed to permanently fix the problem.

I want to give a quick shoutout to @Cloudways, the host of my site.

With the events taking place this week, I’ve received nearly a month’s worth of traffic in three days. Their server is going strong, never slowed down and remains fast despite the pressure.

Thank you!

— Jonathan Bailey (@plagiarismtoday) May 11, 2022

Aside from that, there’s been a significant improvement in loading non-cached pages. Though I use a very aggressive caching policy, there are so many pages on the site that there’s always a good amount of traffic to non-cached content. Previously, those pages would take several seconds to load, notably different from cached pages. With Cloudways, load times dropped to roughly in line with cached content.

Cloudways: How did you find Cloudways compared to other hosting providers regarding security and protection against plagiarism and copyright infringement?

Jonathan Bailey: On one of my previous hosting providers, one of my secondary sites was hacked and used as a spam system. The host did nothing to stop it, and I was only alerted about it when I started getting bounced emails that I didn’t send. When I told the host about it, they did nothing to help me figure out how they got in.

I have not had any security issues with Cloudways, but I like how Cloudways has managed security on the server and application levels. I’m fond of the bot protection features, particularly the tracking of login requests. Through that, I learned that the admin username of one of my other sites had been guessed or otherwise figured out. Though they hadn’t gotten in due to 2FA and not knowing the password, I quickly changed the username.

I’ve noticed that, compared to the level of bot traffic, I had when I started with Cloudways, I’m actually seeing much less today. This is especially true for attempted logins.

While you can get similar features through a Content Delivery Network (CDN), having it baked into the core server is great.

Cloudways: How does Cloudways hosting help you achieve your goals related to combating plagiarism and copyright infringement on the web?

Jonathan Bailey: The best thing, honestly, is not having to worry about my hosting.

I spent several hours per week worrying about hosting some of my previous hosts. This was especially true during times of high traffic or as big stories are breaking, which are the exact times I need to be responsive, field questions, and follow up on new information.

With Cloudways, I honestly haven’t had to think about it. Once things were set up and the initial issues were fixed, it was almost completely set and forgotten. During traffic spikes, CPU and RAM usage doesn’t increase significantly, and we’ve had no significant outages of the site or the server.

I haven’t been checking server usage constantly; I haven’t been watching monitors to make sure the site is responding quickly. It frees time and mental energy to do the necessary work, and I’m eternally grateful.

Cloudways: How do you see the role of Cloudways in supporting copyright holders and webmasters in protecting their intellectual property rights online?

Jonathan Bailey: Having worked with Cloudways even before hosting with them, I can say safely that Cloudways and DigitalOcean are good partners in removing infringing content and addressing piracy on their networks. I’ve never had issues working with them.

Cloudways has always had, to my knowledge, a good Terms of Service that both has good allowances for freedom of speech but also takes a firm stand against misuse, including infringement, spam, and other issues.

In short, their policies are great and backed up with great enforcement.

Cloudways: Would you recommend Cloudways to other copyright holders or webmasters concerned about online security threats?

Absolutely, Cloudways takes security very seriously and provides out-of-the-box tools to help stop the most common threats. Between automatic updates to reduce possible exploits, anti-bot tools, and a great backup system, Cloudways gives a great platform for security and safety.

I will remind any webmaster that security is a team effort. You have to do your part by using the tools given to you, having secure passwords, and keeping up to date with potential issues.

That said, Cloudways is a great partner in security.