How to migrate your Godaddy web hosting to DigitalOcean

Lately I've been reading some good articles about DigitalOcean as a cheap VPS option in online hosting and so I decided to try and subscribe to one.

Since my wordpress website hosting is already expiring I decided to moved the hosting to DigitalOcean and renew the domain name in Godaddy.

Here's how I point my Godaddy domain to DigitalOcean VPS hosting and migrate my wordpress website:

*You must already have a DigitalOcean account with linked payment method (can be either a credit card or paypal).
*Copy all your wordpress files from Godaddy.
*Make a backup of your wordpress database.

1. Create a droplet in digital ocean.
1. Distribution = 15.04 x64
2. Applications = Wordpress 14.04
3. I chose $5 / month
2. Follow this article to configure your server: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-wordpress-on-ubuntu-14-04.
3. Migrating your wordpress website:
1. Using winscp, upload your files in your server's /var/www folder.
2. Make sure that www-data user can write to the folders where it needed to, for example uploads. Note: use chmod. Note by default the uploaded files are owned by root, use chown and change the ownership to www-data.
1. >chown www-data:www-data /var/www -R, change the owner and group of /var/www folder from root to www-data. This is done recursively.
2. >chmod 774, means owner and group (read, write, execute) while others (read-only).
3. Following the tutorial in #2, you should now have phpmyadmin installed. Restore your wordpress backup.
4. We then need to point your domain name to the new ip address in digital ocean.
1. To get your droplet's ip address, go to your digital ocean's droplet's page 
   
5. Now that you have your ip address, go to DNS, and add a domain record like this: 
   
6. We are done with digital ocean and we will now point godaddy's domain to digital ocean's server.
7. In Godaddy expand Domains tab.
8. Chose your domain then click Manage.
9. In Settings tab, under Nameservers click Manage.
10. Setup Type=Custom, then add the 3 nameservers below
1. NS1.DIGITALOCEAN.COM
2. NS2.DIGITALOCEAN.COM
3. NS3.DIGITALOCEAN.COM 
   
11. After adding hit SAVE.
12. You should now see the 3 name servers in the next screen.

Wait for 5minutes, then try logging-in in your linux hosting, and in the terminal run:
>whois makeupchum.com

The command above should give you your digital ocean's ip address and name servers.

And that's it! Your wordpress website must now be running in digital ocean. That's in less than 30mins :-)

Common problems I've encountered:

1. 2 widget were broken, need to set the content again
2. some folders are not writeable when I uploaded need to execute chmod.

Want to try DigitalOcean? Register with this link.