Backing Up EC2 To Dropbox Introduction In this tutorial we’ll be setting up a backup databases from EC2 to Dropbox. You can use it to backup anything you like – logs, your entire webroot, anything really. AWS is reliable, but an offsite backup is best practice – AWS doesn’t make this easy.…
AWS Amazon Linux: allow ssh & sftp access to server
Today I wanted to sftp into the webroot for my server (/var/www) but because of the way the permissions are set up the default ec2-user doesn’t have permission to do this. That directory tree is owned by the user “fred”, which otherwise doesn’t get used. I decided to allow ssh…
Fixing WordPress indexes, foreign keys and auto_increment fields
I recently migrated a number of WordPress websites and a custom PHP website from AWS RDS to MySQL on an EC2 instance using the AWS Database Migration Service. I didn’t know beforehand that secondary indexes, foreign keys, and auto_increment fields aren’t migrated – this made a heck of a mess,…
How to Migrate from RDS to MySQL on EC2
Introduction A year ago I moved all my websites to AWS using the free tier, using an EC2 t2.micro and the RDS relational database service. Now that my year of free tier is up I’d like to reduce my costs. I want to migrate from RDS to MySQL on EC2.…
Remove Gmail Warnings: Setting up DKIM and SPF for your domain
Google has announced recently that they will show an alert if they can’t authenticate the identity of the sender, in both the Gmail website, Android, and Apple iPhone, instead of showing your contact photo. Read on to see how to do something about this by setting up DKIM and SPF…
Upgrade Running Nginx on Amazon Linux
If you’d like to upgrade running Nginx on your Unix server version read on for some information on how to achieve it.
Fixing This Content Is No Longer Available WordPress Facebook Sharing Error
Fixing This Content Is No Longer Available Error Mike from Unique Moments photography contacted me to ask if I could fix a small problem with his WordPress Blog, running the Infinity Grid theme on Good Gallery – though this idea applies to any content shared to Facebook from any platform. Whenever he tried…
Setting Up Cloudflare CDN and Caching – Part Six – Hosting WordPress on AWS Tutorial
Setting up CloudFlare Free CDN for Website Caching and Security Introduction This multi-part tutorial is a complete guide to setting up WordPress on AWS. In this part of our tutorial we’ll be Setting up CloudFlare, a CDN that will let us distribute resources from our website around the world to…
Installing and Configuring PHP 5.6 on Amazon Linux
I’ve recently switched back from HHVM to PHP 5.6 because the version of HHVM I was using (3.6.6) keep hogging memory and failing to respond, and upgrading to a more recent version of HHVM is really difficult on Amazon Linux. PHP7 doesn’t work with one of my WordPress themes (Photocrati) so I can’t use that…
Small Business Websites – What, Why, and How
Small Business Websites What Are They For, Why Do I Need One, and How Can I get One? My wife and I are away on holiday at the moment, I needed to find a small business to help with a service I required. Outside of the main centers of New Zealand it…