When I started this website in 2009, I was using Joomla. Then at some point I switch to WordPress because it was much easier to manage my posts. And it was hosted at one.com, where I initially registered this domain name. However, the network and service wasn’t really stable and I had a lot of hiccups back then. As a result, in 2017 I migrated the website to Scaleway.com, which offers very cheap virtual machines and small bare metal instances.
Another reason why I switched was because I was also running a real-time crypto price crawling and algorithmic trading service with a few servers, and since my website didn’t have a ton of visitors, I could put it together with other services. Back then a small instance cost only 5 euros per month, and I found it to be more cost-effective than other cloud computing providers like AWS, GCP or Vultr. As time went by, I had more resource intensive services running, such as staking pools which require large volumes. I ended up upgrading those tiny instances, and adding more resources from Scaleway. Then later when I phased out such services and reduced the number of instances, I couldn’t switch back to the smaller instances because either they didn’t exist any more or I couldn’t downgrade the volume size. So in the end I was paying a large monthly bill to run a small WordPress application.
And today I finally managed to spare a few hours reviewing the services I need, and decided it to migrate it back to one.com, which I was already paying anyway. As a side note, the price of one.com subscription also increase by 4x or 5x in 10 years.
Migrating WordPress alone is easy: backup all the files and database, then copy files to one.com, import the database, and setup the DNS on Cloudflare. I asked ChatGPT to draw me this flowchart:
+-------------+ +-------------+
| Old Server | Backup files and database | Local Server |
+-------------+ ----------------------------> +-------------+
|
| Import database
v
+------------+
| New Server |
+------------+
|
| Update URLs in database
v
+------------+
| New Server |
+------------+
During the process, I also tried setting up a local LAMP+WP service with docker-compose (this repo is very useful: https://github.com/nezhar/wordpress-docker-compose) and tried exporting my posts into GoHugo format. In the end I believed it was too much hassle and not worth it.
A few issues I encountered during the migration process:
.htaccessfiles should be set up properly, otherwise WP complains about 404 for sub pages.- Some WP plugins were outdated (code highlighting, for example), so it caused some page rendering issues. When I replaced the plugin such issues are gone.
- File permissions has to be 744 or 755 for the
wp-content/uploadsfolder. - I used
nslookup daoyuan.li ns01.one.comto get the IP of one.com’s server, and manually updated it on Cloudflare, since I prefer to use Cloudflare to manage my DNS. In the future I may need to automate this process, in case one.com moves my VM to another server. Or at lease I should monitor the output from ns01.one.com versus kara.ns.cloudflare.com.
Besides migrating WP, I also had a few other websites to migrate. But since they are all static websites, I used Cloudflare Pages to host them and assigned the domains to the corresponding Pages project.
I probably spent 3 to 4 hours migrating everything, and double checking everything works fine. Then I went ahead and terminated all instances, elastic IPs and volumes on Scaleway. That would save me a couple of hundred euros a year. Not bad ROI!
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