This entry will cover on the process of moving out an entire site from old hosting to Google Cloud Platform (GPC). It is assumed that:-
- You have SSH access to old hosting account
- You already create your VM with GPC
- You already install web server/apache & mysql/phpmyadmin on that VM
Step 1
The initial phase is to zip your site files. Access to the old hosting via SSH and zip them:
zip – r website_folder.zip website_folder/
Step 2
The zipped file then can be downloaded via FTP access or any file transfer you prefer, the main point is to move website_folder.zip to GPC.
One easy alternative is to move the zipped file to a downloadable location such as:
mv website_folder.zip website_folder/
Then from GPC SSH:
cd /var/www
wget http://www.website_folder.com/website_folder.zip
Then on your old hosting SSH:
rm website_folder/website_folder.zip
Step 3
Unzip the files on your GPC:
cd /var/www
unzip website_folder.zip
Notes: if there is an error such as “command not found”, just install it.
sudo apt-get install unzip
Now after unzipping the files you will get website_folder in the current path, such as:
/var/www/website_folder
Now change the ownership:
chown -R www-data:www-data website_folder
Step 3
Let’s make a copy of database from old server. Cpanel users will be able to do this via ‘export’ function in phpmyadmin then download the SQL file, name it as website.sql
Step 4
Import the database to your GPC. Go to your VM phpmyadmin, create a database, and do the import function.
Step 5
Update apache configuration file to let it know where your files are located at.
At GPC SSH:
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
Create a file with this content:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName website.com
ServerAlias www.website.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/website.com
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Name it website.com.conf
Then enable it:
sudo a2ensite website.com.conf
sudo service apache2 restart
Step 6
Now point your domain DNS to GPC external IP address.
After the the DNS propagation done, the website should be served from GPC already.