I’ve been wanting to move my WordPress site to an Arm Server for a while. Since I have been paying too much for my previous managed WordPress host for far too many years, I decided now’s the time to finally make the move! I checked the latest news about the Amazon AWS Graviton instances and saw they provide a Free Tier Arm Server instance! So I thought, let’s try and see if that can be good enough for my WordPress website!
Following a guide that I found via Google by Mark Forster on GitHub which I found linked on his YouTube video, as I couldn’t figure out to do all the procedures (I got stuck at “sudo mysql_secure_installation”) to successfully install and migrate my WordPress site with its 6000+ posts and videos on here, I got support by eztutz on Fiverr to install and migrate my WordPress site to a free Arm Server Amazon AWS Graviton instance.
It would’ve been easier I guess if Amazon had Arm based Lightsail WordPress one-click deployment option, or a Bitnami on AWS for the Arm based AWS Graviton instance, but as far as I know, for now they only support x86 🙂
To help try to keep the performance at an OK level on this Free Tier AWS instance, I went back to my very old “Times New Roman” Simplish WordPress theme, which I was using around 10 or so years ago 🙂 but wanting to update the look to a two column I contacted and got support by shovonboshak11 on Fiverr to customize my basic simple WordPress theme to my liking. It’s not perfect with the gaps in the two columns but I think that this is much better than what I was using previously 🙂
I also try to use CloudFlare CDN via the free Cloudflare DNS, the free WordPress.com Jetpack CDN plugin and I may try any other such tricks (caching or other? maybe I shouldn’t both use CloudFlare and Jetpack together?) to try to speed up and remove as much requirements from my free server as possible to be able to stay for now on this free tier AWS instance 🙂 If my website somehow gets a lot of views again in the future I might consider then upgrading to one of the paid Arm based Graviton instances, if needed 🙂
