Moving from Hostgator Magento 1.9.3.3 to Digital Ocean Magento 1.9.4.4

Question

I am trying to move away from a HostGator VPS to a Digital Ocean VPS and also upgrade my Magento version in the meantime. I have a very basic knowledge of VPS and the LAMP stack.

So on Hostgator, I am actually using a WHM + CPanel setup and I would like to just manage it myself without the CPanel in DigitalOcean.

This is my current stack:

• Magento Version: 1.9.3.3
• Linux: CentOS release 6.10 (Final)
• Apache: Apache/2.4.43 (cPanel)
• MySQL: mysql Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.6.43, for Linux (x86_64) using EditLine wrapper
• PHP: PHP 5.6.40 (cli) (built: Apr 7 2020 18:17:28) Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies with the ionCube PHP Loader v4.7.5, Copyright (c) 2002-2014, by ionCube Ltd., and with Zend Guard Loader v3.3, Copyright (c) 1998-2014, by Zend Technologies with Zend OPcache v7.0.4-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2015, by Zend Technologies

From my understanding, since 2019, Magento 1.9.x.x started supporting PHP 7.2. Which is great news. I want to see if it is possible to set up a LAMP server on Digital Ocean with the lastest CentOS, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP. I would also like to start using the latest version of Magento 1: 1.9.4.4

This is my thought process for doing so.

1. Create a new droplet (Is this enough?)

   • 1 GB Memory
   • 1 vCPU
   • 1 TB Transfer
   • 25 GB SSD Disk

2. Install the latest version of LAMP on the newest version of CentOS.

3. Install the latest version of Magento on top of the LAMP stack.
4. Install the required PHP modules and Apache Modules
5. Backup the database on the old server and restore it on the new server.
6. Backup the files on the old server and add it to the new server. (I actually do not know which folders/files need to be migrated over if you can kindly help me list them out, that would be super).

Would these steps work out? I really do appreciate your help on this matter.

Answer 1

You should get to the correct version of Magento before or after you do your server migration. You should not mix up the process of migrating your server with upgrading your website. You can spin up a new server on Digital Ocean that matches your old box. I would then do the upgrade to Magento. (Or do the upgrade then do the migration)

Separating these steps will make everything much easier.

As a footnote. The steps you listed would work and you could do a "Test run" of the upgrade. If the upgrade goes smoothly then your process would work fine. From a network standpoint, it may be more efficient to have two boxes on Digital Ocean, one that meets your old specs and one that meets your new specs. This will give you faster network access internally.