To spice things up a bit, I've decided to move from shared hosting into a VPS. I managed to find a cheap VPS service and paid for half a year. The OS is Debian 12, of course.

Before I began, I installed all the necessary packages with 

apt install certbot nginx-light php-fpm python3-certbot-nginx

and created an operational user (called user for simplicity) with 

useradd -m user

I then copied the whole installation directory from the old server to the new server. For that, I simply tarred the whole thing into .tar.bz2 (the shared hosting does not have xz for some reason) for ease of transport.

After unpacking the installation directory on the new server, I took a sample nginx config that came with the Grav installation (it's under sample_config/) and copied it to /etc/nginx/sites-available and renamed it to default, without forgetting to save the original default as with a different name. I also ensured to keep the line 

    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;

The reason to have my site on the default was simply because I didn't have my domain name directed at this server yet.

After I ensured the nginx runs with that new config, I opened up my browser and entered my new IP address. First thing I saw was... nothing. So I opened up the log and saw some permission issue, where I realized that the ownership of the site directory is messed up due to differences in how users are set in the old server.

This was easily fixed with 

chown user:www-data -R site

I then went back to my browser and refreshed. To which I saw:

grav-error

Which I simply fixed with: 

apt install php-curl php-gd php-mbstring php-xml php-zip

I finally was able to see my regular front page.

But wait, my domain was still not pointing to the new IP!

I went to my domain name provider's control panel and changed the A Record.

I knew DNS propagation might take some time, but I sensed something off when it's been overnight. After a quick chat with the tech support, I learned I needed to change the nameservers as well to ns{1,2,3}.systemdns.com.

After an hour break, I tested with certbot: 

certbot certonly --nginx -d timkenhan.co --dry-run

When I see the successful result, I ran the above command without the --dry-run and updated the nginx config to include the domain name, ssl certs, and logging. Oh, I also renamed with a more specific name.

And here we are!