Migration to Digital Ocean & DNS

Question

Hi All,

I am looking for some advice around the best way to achieve the following, essentially i currently run 3 wordpress websites all hosted on 3 different shared hosting accounts. Lets call them r2d2.com, C3P0.com & BB8.com i want to consolidate these down and move over to a VPS on DO. I do however need to minimise any downtime and would like to take the opportunity of the move to do some testing on new features in advance. This is my plan so far"

Build a new droplet based on Ubuntu 16.04, secure it and then install a LEMP stack. Add on a management platform (VirtualMin or ServerPilot).
Deploy 3 new virtual sites on the server (testing.r2d2.com, testing.c3po.com & testing.bb8.com). At this point i will add NS Record with my naming provider to point these subdomains to the DO name servers. 3.Clone the live sites and deploy to the DO droplet, Make and test any changes.
When Ready clone to testing sites to 3 new sites in the DO droplet using the original names.
Create a records on my dns to point r2d2.com, C3P0.com and BB8.com to my droplet.

Hopefully the above makes sense, i have three questions though.

Will the above work, the bit i am really unsure about is the DNS? 2.What size of Droplet will i need to achieve this(I appreciate this will only be rough estimates without the full details of the sites) 3.Which management platform do people recommend, i do have a long term view of potentially hosting other peoples sites in DO.

Thanks in advance for the help.

W

Jason Peters · Answer

Great decision on moving to DigitalOcean. I moved my personal workloads to here some years ago and have loved the platform while using it in various capacities. What you are trying to achieve is quite possible and not without the possibility of achieving it through various methods. One approach I would take is as follows for a single droplet setup using the DigitalOcean DNS + Firewalls etc…: - Note: No admin panel outside DigitalOcean is used Create a droplet that suited the task. Could start with the $5 1GB/1CPU/25GB - The droplet size can later be increased as required.Note: The droplet does need to be powered off when scaling and will result in an outage for the website(s) https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-your-first-digitalocean-droplet Assign the droplet a Floating IPhttps://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-floating-ips-on-digitalocean Add the domains for the 3 sites to DigitalOcean DNS and add the appropriate entries for each domain. I at this point as a subdomain of dev.* to each domain - i.e. dev.c3po.com that points to the Floating IPhttps://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-host-name-with-digitalocean For revers DNS/PTR Records if requiredhttps://serverpilot.io/community/articles/how-to-set-ptr-records-and-reverse-dns.html Setup Firewall policy and add the droplethttps://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-digitalocean-cloud-firewalls Create a linux user account for each site and setup the home directory as desired. EXAMPLE: /home/c3po - home - - c3po - - - public_html - - - logs - - - backups Setup the LEMP stackhttps://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-nginx-mysql-php-lemp-stack-in-ubuntu-16-04 Configure PHP Pool for each accounthttps://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-host-multiple-websites-securely-with-nginx-and-php-fpm-on-ubuntu-14-04 Note: this is for Ubuntu:14.04 however the process is the same for Ubuntu:16.04 EXAMPLE: /etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/c3po.conf [c3po] user = c3po group = c3po listen = /var/run/php/php7.0-fpm-c3po.sock listen.owner = nginx listen.group = nginx request_terminate_timeout = 300 pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 5 pm.start_servers = 2 pm.min_spare_servers = 1 pm.max_spare_servers = 3 chdir = / Clone the first first site into the respective user account and web root Add NGINX entry EXAMPLE: /etc/nginx/conf.d/c3po.com.conf upstream php7 { server unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm-c3po.sock; } server { listen 80; server_name dev.c3po.com c3po.com www.c3po.com; charset utf-8; access_log /home/c3po/logs/access.log; error_log /home/c3po/logs/error_log; location / { root /home/c3po/public_html; index index.php index.html index.htm; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass php7; fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root/$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_read_timeout 300; } } Add an entry to the DNS zone file for dev.* - dev.c3po.com to your registrar or previous hosting zone file that points to the Droplets Floating IP - Test everything out to ensure it is working as expected. Remove dev.* entry from the DigitalOcean DNS and NGINX Config once complete. Update your domain(s) to DigitalOceans nameservers ns1.digitalocean.com, ns2.digitalocean.com, ns3.digitalocean.com Secure the LEMP stack with LetsEncrypt once domain propagation is completehttps://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-16-04 Rinse and repeat for each domain as required. As stated before this is one possible way. Depending on the application you are running some details may need to be adjusted accordingly. Another approach - https://blog.ssdnodes.com/blog/tutorial-using-docker-and-nginx-to-host-multiple-websites/ Setting up Vanity Name Servers - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-vanity-or-branded-nameservers-with-digitalocean-cloud-servers To avoid downtime you could design an infrastructure that spans multiple droplets with redundancy systems built in - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tags/high-availability?type=tutorials

alexdo · Answer

You can always start with a droplet that matches your current hosting environment in terms of resoruces - CPU, RAM and Disk Space and if needed upgrade to a larger droplet in the future. You can follow this article on how to setup your DNS: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-vanity-or-branded-nameservers-with-digitalocean-cloud-servers We have a series of tutorials that cover the process of migrating from one Linux server to another which you can check here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorial_series/how-to-migrate-to-a-new-linux-server In general, depending on your site/application you will need to spin up a droplet that matches your current hosting provider environment or at least is suitable for your app/site needs (e.g running the same PHP version). Then you need to migrate your data (files, users, database and etc). Another option is to use the All-in-One WP Migration plugin. The plugin can handle the migration process on your behalf. https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-migration/ This article also covers the process, although it is outdated: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-migrate-wordpress-from-shared-hosting-to-a-cloud-server-with-zero-downtime The final step will be to test everything and make sure it is working fine and then switch the DNS settings and push your site live from DigitalOcean. Regards

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