Following up on my earlier post, it has been pretty straightforward to so far to migrate this blog from Rackspace to GCP. It’s going pretty much as expected, but the architecture is going to be slightly different than I initially thought.

I decided against hosting the media in Google Cloud Storage, since I wouldn’t be able to use the rich functionality of the WordPress Media Gallery. This does mean the node is storing more data than I initially envisioned, but it’s easy to restore in the event I lose the node. The use of Cloud SQL for the database is working out well. I reckon I’ll save $10-$15 month too, reducing my monthly bill to less than $40.

There is one annoyance however. There seems to be no simple solution for migrating the media itself, such that it just appears automagically in the WordPress Media Gallery. Simply copying the files over to the same location on the new node didn’t work, since it quickly became apparent that there are database records that need to be copied too. This is not trivial, and it appears I’ll need to make some changes directly to the database. This seems like such an obvious oversight when it comes to migrating a WordPress blog, I wonder if I am missing something.

I’m pretty close to switching the DNS record — hopefully soon.