Shared Hosting Exodus Toolkit

[paragonie-scott]

Motivation / Problem Being Solved

Make it easier for folks to migrate off shared web hosting (which typically means outdated versions of PHP).

Notes

• Minimal interaction
• Two components
  • The extractor, for backing up all your data from a shared hosting site
  • The deployer, for deploying all your data to a VPS (same company, lowendbox, EC2, etc.)
• Extractor
  • Encrypted backups
    • Database dumps
    • Root directories with exclusions for e.g. unnecessary log files
    • Use GNU parallels if available to speed the process up
  • Use ParagonIE_Sodium_File
  • Supports PHP 5.2
• Deployer
  • Auto-configure a system to be secure
    • Installs PHP 7.1
    • Installs PECL libsodium
    • Installs the grsec kernel patches
    • Install/configure yum-cron or unattended-upgrades
  • Restores from the backup
  • Default configuration:
    • Caddy + PHP7.1-FPM
  • Apache2 configuration:
    • Also add certbot

[AshleyPinner]

Some people are stuck on crappy hosts because the host also handles their mail. It would be nice if the script could also setup a well-secured, encryption-enabled mailserver.

[paragonie-scott]

Obstacle: You probably don't have access to that from the SSH access you're granted on most shared hosting.

[ghost]

I'd agree that email migration would be a substantial obstacle- both in terms of people needing it, and finding a way to make it work.

Migrating thinks like web content, DNS, etc. is fairly easy in comparison. It shouldn't be that hard to build something that allows the user to enter IMAP credentials, and replicate the setup on the new server and import existing data - but setting up a secure email server is complex, so would likely add substantially to the time required.

That said though, that base setup would likely find many users, beyond those that use it for migration.

[paragonie-scott]

If only there was a good mail server that integrated with Caddy.

If anyone knows when such a thing is available, it would be @mholt6. Until then, I'll have to read up on postfix configuration, etc.