Moving off shared hosting without breaking anything
A migration checklist from someone who has done it many times, including the three steps everyone forgets and regrets.
Migrations go wrong in predictable ways. Almost always because someone changed DNS before everything was ready, or forgot that email lives in the same place as the website.
Before you touch anything
Take a full backup and restore it somewhere else to prove it works. An untested backup is not a backup. This single step has saved more migrations than any other.
Write down every service running on the old host: website, email, databases, cron jobs, subdomains, SSL certificates, FTP accounts. People migrate the site and discover a week later that a scheduled report stopped running.
The email trap
On shared hosting, email usually lives on the same server. If you move the domain without moving or repointing email first, mail stops arriving — and unlike a website outage, you will not notice immediately. You will notice when a client asks why you never replied.
# Antes de mover nada, baja el TTL del DNS# asi el cambio propaga en minutos y no en horasdig +short aprwebs.com A # Y comprueba a donde apunta el correo AHORAdig +short aprwebs.com MXThe order that works
Set up the new server completely. Copy the site and test it using a hosts-file override, so you see the new server while the world still sees the old one. Migrate email and verify sending and receiving. Lower the DNS TTL 24 hours in advance. Only then switch DNS. Keep the old host alive for two weeks.
The three everyone forgets
Redirects from old URLs, if the structure changed. SSL on the new server before the switch, not after. And cron jobs, which live outside the website and never get copied automatically.
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