Moving Nine Sites Before the Shutdown

A hosting provider announced it was shutting down — with one day’s notice. Nine websites lived there, with databases, mailboxes and certificates. Everything had to come off before access expired.

What was done

  • Backup of all nine accounts through the provider’s own API, without server access
  • Zones moved to Cloudflare with the records mirrored in full — MX, SPF and DKIM first, so no mail would be lost
  • Sites brought up on our own server in containers
  • Fresh Let’s Encrypt certificates and a switch to Full (strict)
  • Row-by-row comparison of the data before the shutdown

Result

  • 9 accounts rescued, including two historical databases that existed nowhere else
  • Difference after comparison: four spam comments — nothing else
  • No downtime for visitors: the switch happened only once the new site was already answering

Stack: cPanel API, rsync, MariaDB, Docker, Cloudflare API, certbot

Description