Pain-free server migration
I recently had a complete a server migration for PAWS New England, the animal rescue we’ve adopted our last few dogs from.
I’ve been working with them for at least 15 years now, and the server we were using was running an aging version of Ubuntu. It was time.
Normally, I dread server migrations.
With static websites and flat-file storage like my personal sites, they’re not that bad. But PAWS architecture has a mix of a static site generator and two self-hosted WordPress installs (a suboptimal setup that happened organically over time).
Last time I had to do something like this, it took me days.
But ServerPilot, the cloud management tool I use with DigitalOcean, now has a migration tool that didn’t exist a few years, and it made things absurdly easy.
- Setup my new DigitalOcean droplet
- Connect the droplet/server in ServerPilot
- Create an app for the new server in ServerPilot
- Use their migration tool to migrate all of the files and both databases (this literally took less than 2 minutes)
- Update the A record in DigitalOcean to point to the new droplet
In just 15 minutes, the migration was done.
I’ve always recommended ServerPilot to folks, and now I have to recommend them even harder. This was amazing!