Hello there.
I has been a while. I needed to move my web site and blog. Got new servers in the cloud.
And of course had a few issues migrating them since they are on WordPress.
So buckle up and I will let you know.
So I did move, which meant I had to uproot my home network. In reality not so bad.
However, instead of hosting my sites locally I decided to move then to the cloud and see how that went.
So, I went the cloud provider route. Found a cloud provider, cheap about $5 a month.
Shared CPU’s, memory ad disk space (this in my opinion means it is a container of some sort).
Since my web sites really do not have that much traffic this is not an issue but if it becomes an issue I can always upgrade!
Thus I did get me a nice server and install it (went from Fedora to Ubuntu), got no issues, update my DNS settings and iI was ready to go.
The question was how to migrate my sites. They use WordPress.
Two options:
- Migrate the whole server
- Migrate only the WordPress sites.
Migrating the whole server meant using something like CloneZilla.
Of course I had to test, so using EXSI (EVE would have been also ok however there is no easy way of adding an ISO or a disk after creating a VM, a limitation in my opinion) and did test that I could restore the OS.
It worked fairly well, using NFS or adding a second drive and using the clone from an additional disk. However, I realized that it would not work on my new cloud provider since the server is really a container and not a so called “server” either physical or virtual.
Perhaps could have worked, but decided to use any of the WordPress backup plug-ins that are offered.
So I tried, All-in-One WP migration and UpdraftPlus. Both worked fine and using EVE in this case I was able to migrate the site with no issue (well until I did for good).
So, I did try and failed !
I spent a whole day chasing a ghost literally. I did realize it was me. what happened was that when I created the server I went for the latest Ubuntu, great without realizing it would install PHP 8.x, while my server only had PHP 7.x.
After that I downgraded PHP and use the alternatives service, and voila it worked. Either one worked fine.
However, something else came to bite me.
I was so happy that I decided to upgrade all the plugins, well the Photo Album broke. Why I do not know no yet. Had to restore twice from backup.
It is an issue with “New Photo Gallery”, after upgrading the plug-in it only shows the “short code”, which should then show you thumbnails. But it does not. I will try using a different gallery plug-in and recreate my galleries.
In any case my sites are migrated and seemed to work fine, I am writing this new blog on the migrated site.
So there you have it.
Ciao.