1 Click Migration started with the a single goal: to be the most user-friendly and powerful migration plugin on the market. It wouldn’t be the first, but the idea was that with just a couple steps, a user could move their site from one place to another by installing a single plugin. No worrying about storage, which host they were on, or technical specifications of each server, just a simple, straightforward migration.
The Alpha Particle Approach
We began by taking a look at the migration plugins already on the market. We looked at what they did well and how they implemented their approach. Based on this audit as well as our own architecture plan, we came up with an implementation blueprint. However, all the plugins we surveyed required you to bring your own storage solution, either by downloading your migration files, paying for your own cloud storage solution, or paying a subscription fee to use the plugin. For 1 Click Migration, we wanted to offer users a free plugin with truly no strings attached, so we got to work.
Serverless and Cloud Storage Combined
To make this plugin free without maintenance costs breaking the bank, we relied heavily on cloud technologies, specifically Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) S3 storage solution and Lambda, their serverless solution.
By leveraging both of these technologies, we could spin up and spin down storage on the fly for each of the plugins users. This kept costs low, as buckets were automatically decommissioned when they were no longer needed. In addition, this meant each customers data was stored separately and could be encrypted on a per-user basis, increasing security.
With this solution deployed, it meant the plugin could be entirely self-service for users. They could initiate and complete migrations with no involvement from the 1 Click Migration team and after their migration was complete, their files would be cleaned up automatically.
One Plugin, Every Environment
The fact that the plugin abstracted away storage concerns and was extremely simple to use would mean nothing if the plugin didn’t work. We worked with the 1 Click Migration team to test the plugin on a huge list of popular WordPress hosts. From shared hosting to managed hosting all the way up to dedicated VPS solutions, we wanted to make sure the plugin worked no matter your environment.
This necessitated the use of workarounds like moving the long-running processes of encryption and upload into the background to avoid timeout limits, splitting the files to avoid large uploads folders from breaking the migration, and much more.
Only when we were confident the plugin could handle everything that a user could throw at it did we release this plugin into the WordPress Plugin Repository.
How Can We Help?
If you want to talk more about this project or how we can have a similar impact on your project, please reach out using the contact form below or send an email to hello@alphaparticle.com