Newbie question about Lightsail and WP

Question

Hi all,
I'm migrating my existing WP website to Lightsail since a couple of days ago. However, once the migration was done, I got an "Error establishing a database connection" message. I followed instructions watching several tutorials and none of them explained this: is it necessary to create and attach a database to the instance in Lightsail? I wonder if this is the reason why my site is currently down.

Thanks in advance

![Enter image description here](/media/postImages/original/IML-Pc7D3ySG6MlBzFzs57KA)

Answer

Hi,

By default, when you provision a WordPress instance a MySQL database is created within the instance to facilitate WordPress. Yes, we can provision a separate database and connect it to WordPress but that is something we need to configure manually. The most probable cause might be the MySQL connection string including credentials got changed during the migration.

This guide might be useful to troubleshoot your issue -> [https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/lightsail-wordpress-fix-database-errors](https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/lightsail-wordpress-fix-database-errors)

And if you want to migrate to a managed database -> [https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/en_us/articles/amazon-lightsail-connect-wordpress-to-mysql-managed-database
](https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/en_us/articles/amazon-lightsail-connect-wordpress-to-mysql-managed-database
)
Hope this helps.

Newbie question about Lightsail and WP

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