Even though it is time consuming, I think we have to reconsider our web hosting options regularly. If our current provider does not renew its products and services, together with their pricing structure (Amazon does, 1and1 does not), they become less competitive.
After long research, I have decided that AWS has confusing pricing structure and it is a bit more expensive than Digital Ocean, although Digital Ocean does not provide all the services I am used to such as load balancing, RDS and security; you have to do most of the work yourself, which means a DIY environment and that may be why they became more popular among techies.
DOMAIN NAME TRANSFER
So, I’ve started the domain transfer on several domains.
For .co.uk domains, it is simple and free. Using the control panel on 1and1 I’ve managed to find “cancellation” process one by one, which lets me enter the tag of the new provider: for Amazon it is GANDI. On Route 53, I have initiated the transfer by “keeping current name servers” in charge, faking it. Then, I created a hosted zone for each domain. They give you a list of name servers, copy them. Go back to “Registered Domains” and go to “Add/Edit Name Server” and replace the name servers. Repeat this for each domain.
Once I completed the DNS entries for my web servers and mail servers, I got the control of my domains. I created a server on Digital Ocean to serve some websites using their LEMP template which comes with Ubuntu, Nginx, MySQL, PHP-FPM (Fast CGI Process Manager).
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/MigratingDNS.html
For .com domains, I had to unlock the domains for transfer. 1and1 gives you authorization keys.
I will return to .com websites, but I want to complete the transfer and setup of the websites and email servers.
Here is a very useful website:
https://www.exratione.com/2014/05/a-mailserver-on-ubuntu-1404-postfix-dovecot-mysql/
I preferred to use Webmin and Nginx.