DigitalOcean to AWS migration for a SaaS platform

Planned and executed a multi-environment cloud migration for a small SaaS company, diagnosing a critical misconfiguration along the way that was already causing production failures.

• AWS EC2
• Terraform
• MySQL
• PHP-FPM
• Cloudflare

Context

A small SaaS company running on DigitalOcean needed to move to AWS across three environments (stage, dev, production) without downtime or data loss.

Challenge

Migrate safely in the right order (stage → dev → prod), while the existing environment had performance issues nobody had fully diagnosed yet.

What I did

• Audited the existing DigitalOcean stack — MySQL configuration, PHP-FPM/OPcache tuning, network exposure.
• Found a critical PHP memory_limit misconfiguration that was already causing intermittent production failures, and a MySQL bind-address setting that was an unnecessary security exposure.
• Planned and executed the environment-by-environment migration to AWS EC2, with Terraform-managed infrastructure and Cloudflare in front for TLS/DNS.
• Delivered a formal technical proposal and a final migration report as client deliverables.

Stack

AWS EC2, Terraform, MySQL, PHP-FPM, Cloudflare.

Outcome

Migrated all three environments to AWS without data loss, fixed a live production bug the client didn’t know they had, and closed a security gap in the same engagement.