Well, that was an ordeal.

A few weeks ago I got an email that my shared web hosting account (that I use for both this site and RoaldDahlFans) was up for renewal, and it reminded me that I didn’t like the host I was using. I was stuck on PHP5 and they were going to charge me more to move to a server with PHP7, and that pissed me off. So I asked Twitter what to do.

I got a lot of different answers, most of which were a LOT more expensive than I was spending. I was okay with going up a little bit, but these are both hobby sites rather than professional so anything over, say, $20/month was too much. A few folks threw out the suggestion to use Amazon Lightsail, which was intriguing. After all, it’s always a good idea to eat your own dog food. (I should also mention that these sites are and have always been hosted and paid for by me personally, so they’re not running on my employee AWS account or anything like that.)

I thought I’d document the process that I followed for the sites, which was based on this blog post and this AWS tutorial. Truthfully, setting up a new WordPress site on Lightsail is super easy and takes less than hour. All the complexity was because I was migrating two very old and very crufty sites from PHP5 to PHP7 and trying to preserve twenty years’ worth of old URLs. So even though I encountered a few hurdles not described in the tutorials, I wouldn’t let that stop you. Read on for the details…

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