After using a local hosting company for many years, I guess it is time to finally move this current website to my own company’s servers and resources. Yes, as non-techie guy, I leveraged Amazon Lightsail to host my WordPress instance and managed to migrate everything across. To be honest, the requirements for this WordPress blog is quite low, I don’t get high traffic on this site.
Initially I started searching on ways to ensure that the WordPress could be scaled up as well as looking at ways to even leverage off containers. There are some tutorials out there which allows me to do it but based on my requirements, it would be extremely overkill. So, to keep things simple, I saw that one can just spin up a WordPress instance in minutes using Amazon Lightsail, so Lightsail it is.
Using my existing personal AWS account, I went into the AWS console, chose Lightsail and then spun up a Linux debian instance for WordPress. As AWS Lightsail uses the Bitnami packaged application, it was really easy to set things up. Next I had to migrate all of my existing data from my host to AWS. I had to leverage off a number of migration plugins to assist with the backup and restore. There was trouble as well setting up the SSL certificates as when I migrated everything, I even migrated the SSL certificates to the new host which pointed back to the old host.
Long story short, after a good number of tries, testing and also figuring out where I made mistakes, I think the site is now running correctly again. Next steps, due to several migrations in the past, my media library is bloated and I have to figure out a way to remove the duplicate entries as well as the broken links in my older posts as well.
For more information about Amazon Lightsail, check out the link below.
Tutorials I used
Here are some of the online guides which I used in order to set up and migrate my blog over to Amazon Lightsail.
- Launch and configure a WordPress instance in Amazon Lightsail
- Plugin used for migration: All-in-One WP Migration
- Setting a new SSL certificate for my WordPress instance on Amazon Lightsail
You can deploy a WordPress website in only minutes on Amazon Lightsail! It is very simple and there are plenty of guides and documentation online which helped me set it up.
