Site Migration to AWS

This blog and its predecessor have been hosted on a shared hosting server (Hostgator and Arvixe). These providers are great as they make hosting both basic, PHP-based websites and email incredibly easy. However, these providers are not as straight-forward when setting up multiple SSL certificates, Node.JS sites, or other more advanced needs. That being the direction I'm moving towards and doing more work within Amazon's AWS Cloud infrastructure, I've decided to migrate away from share hosting providers.

One of the benefits of shared hosting providers is that email is, usually, included as part of the service. While I don't use the email attached to my personal domain very much, I do use it on occasion. AWS does include email hosting through Workmail. The cost of $4 per month per user is more than I'd like. It seems that is how most email providers operate, a monthly cost per user between $2 and $25 (Google's Enterprise Business is the extreme).

Zoho is an email provider that offers free (nag-ware) service for a single domain. There are a couple important DNS settings that need to be made when using a third-party email provider. If you don't, emails will likely end up in other people's spam boxes. That's in addition to setting the MX records so that email gets directed to the provider. These two settings SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). Your email provider will have specifics on what values need to be assigned. Once the DNS propagates the new records, you can send and receive email with your new email provider.

Shared hosting providers will manage DNS settings for you. If your domain registrar is different than your web host, you'll usually need to set the DNS settings with your registrar to point to your web host and everything else is taken care for you. Setting up a webserver on AWS requires steps with Route 53, Amazon's DNS service. Techgenix has a good walk through of setting up Route 53.

Migrating the blog, it's code base and database, went without too much trouble. It consisted of copying files from the shared hosting server to the EC2 server I've setup to host the new site and to export the database from one server to the other. The only hangup was my new web server not already allowing the rewriting of URLs that the blogging software wants. That only required a single command to enable to resolve.