As you probably know (see the banner above) I am a happy user of DigitalOcean for many years now – I host multiple websites on a single server without any hassle. They don’t get that much traffic – 1000 or so hits a month for this one for example – so I’m happy sticking with the $5 per month offering for now.
Ubuntu 16.04 is reaching end of life!
It’s time for an upgrade! According to the DigitalOcean documentation it is not recommended to upgrade in-place (do-release-upgreade in the terminal)… I tried and stuff broke, so that is good advice. Luckily I have backups enabled for an extra $1 per month only, so restoring the server was a one-click affair. Now I have a new droplet and need to migrate ALL of my sites to it one by one.
Migration Notes:
- I followed this excellent tutorial: https://medium.com/@christoph.schmidl/how-to-manually-backup-wordpress-daa43e37a9bd to backup the mysql database and wordpress folder (/var/www/mysite) – but used wget on the new server to fetch the archives directly.
- I had to revoke the letsencrypt https certification – https://maximef.com/2020/10/21/how-to-delete-certbot-certificate-by-domain-name-lets-encrypt/ – don’t forget to remove old files left behind
- In the DigitalOcean dashboard, point the url to the new droplet
- Create new virtual host files and enable in apache (a2enmod sitename.com) – to learn more about using apache virtualhost files to host multiple sites on one server see: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-apache-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-18-04 – it’s the same for 20.04
- I had an issue with the WordPress database but found out that all that’s needed is to match the wordpress wp-config.php information to the mysql database and user info. This tutorial was helpful (if a bit out of date, the procedure for creating a user has changed…) https://www.vultr.com/docs/troubleshooting-wordpress-database-errors
- Create new LetsEncrypt https cert – see #2 link, using certbot.
- And everything works (hopefully)
Tweaking the server:
I had some issues with the Ubuntu Server being a bit slow sometimes – think I used the one click WordPress install. It seems that there are ways to optimize this – here is a great link to some ideas about this:
- Add swap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-space-on-ubuntu-20-04
- More settings for swap: https://bitlaunch.io/blog/how-to-create-and-adjust-swap-space-in-ubuntu-20-04/
Now my server is running smoothly, it’s time to migrate this blog. Or have I done it already? I doubt you would notice!