How to migrate your Godaddy web hosting to DigitalOcean
Tech-Today

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.




- Enable Https On Wordpress In Amazon
This tutorial will help us install Wordpress on Amazon using a Wordpress image provided by Bitnami. We will also enable HTTPS by using an Amazon's elastic load balancer and a WordPress plugin. Steps Create an EC2 instance and install this Wordpress...

- Wordpress Cannot Add Menu Item Solved
Recently we encountered a problem wherein we cannot add anymore menu-items to our wordpress main navigation menu. On top of that the theme's menu assignment is unchecked whenever we tried to add a menu-item and hit save. Solution: Add the following...

- How To Setup A Subdomain In Your Nginx Server
Lately I've created a sub-domain for one of my website. I hope you follow this blog on how to setup your nginx wordpress site. In the same server where I host my maindomain.com, I've added a subdomain.maindomain.com. And here is how: I created...

- Setup Wordpress In A Sub-domain In Godaddy's Windows Hosting
This configuration is for windows only. Configuration: For example you have domain anime.com that is powered by wordpress, you set up permalinks to use postname so post will be accessible at http://anime.com/postname. The problem is when you create a...

- Configure Custom Wordpress Permalink
The following guidelines will help us debug a custom wordpress permalink. Normally we want the URL to be customized, has sense for SEO purposes but wordpress by default use the jurassic id system (page_id=xxx). Fortunately wordpress already offer this...



Tech-Today








.