Migrating to AWS Lightsail
As per the title my 12 months free tier usage for this AWS account has expired. As this website would cost me around $60 per month, I decided to migrate to AWS Lightsail, with prices starting at a more attractive $3.50 per month. Thankfully I had billing alerts configured to warn me on the increased spend.
![](https://www.ianstacey.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NoLongerIntheFreeTier20210927-1024x640.png)
The process to migrate was simple enough following the online instructions, first exporting my current site, deploying a new WordPress Bitnami image on Amazon Lightsail and then importing.
![](https://d9yljz1nd5001.cloudfront.net/en_us/67df2385bb53f3582363d944dca94837/images/steps-for-migrating-your-existing-wordpress-blog-to-amazon-lightsail.png)
I had some configuration to do in terms of the site, enabling HTTPS, assigning a free static IP and updating Route 53.
Once I was happy with the migration, I took final backups from the old architecture including a final snapshot of the RDS database instance before deleting the resources.
![](https://www.ianstacey.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/FinalRDSDBbackup.png)