How do I migrate a wordpress site hosted by digitalocean to another web host? It seems incredibly difficult.

Hey there

Please check out the article below ,it might help http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-move-wordpress-to-a-new-host-or-server-with-no-downtime/

DigitalOcean does not block anyone from migrating their websites / applications around - WordPress included.

There are a few ways to do so - this is one.

• ssh into your droplet
• cd /PATH/TO/WEBROOT
• issue the following command(s):

DBNAME=$(grep DB_NAME "wp-config.php" | cut -d "'" -f 4); \
DBUSER=$(grep DB_USER "wp-config.php" | cut -d "'" -f 4); \
DBPASS=$(grep DB_PASSWORD "wp-config.php" | cut -d "'" -f 4); \
mysqldump -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASS} ${DBNAME} > ${DBNAME}.sql

This will drop a copy of your database into the same directory as your wordpress installation. Please note this works only for a standard WordPress installation - This can also be done quite easily with phpMyAdmin if it is available.

• package up everything using whatever archive tool you choose - I prefer zip - zip -r ../html.zip /PATH/TO/WEBROOT

This will place a *.zip archive one directory up.

• move the archive to the new server scp ../html.zip USERNAME@IP_OR_HOSTNAME:/PATH/TO/WEBROOT

• Leave your droplet

• Within the new host create your new database using whichever tool is available or proffered

• ssh into your new host and cd /PATH/TO/WEBROOT

• unzip html.zip -d ./

• copy the old wp-config cp wp-config.php wp-tempfile - we are only going to use this temporarily

• edit the wp-config.php file updating the database connection details with that of your new host

• upload the database

OLDDBNAME=$(grep DB_NAME "wp-tempfile" | cut -d "'" -f 4); \
DBNAME=$(grep DB_NAME "wp-config.php" | cut -d "'" -f 4); \
DBUSER=$(grep DB_USER "wp-config.php" | cut -d "'" -f 4); \
DBPASS=$(grep DB_PASSWORD "wp-config.php" | cut -d "'" -f 4); \
mysql -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASS} ${DBNAME} < ${OLDDBNAME}.sql

• remove zip archive and wp-tempfile rm -v wp-tempfile html.zip

Please note that this may need to be adjusted to suite your server setup for the source and destination server and wordpress installation - i.e. you may need to install and configure NGINX/APACHE, MySQL/MariaDB etc…

Another solution is to use something like this

https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-migrate-db/