Theme
Hosting and migrations
Moving sites, domains and servers between platforms without customers noticing.
25 posts by DX, in two lanes: plain-language stories and the technical build log.
Everyday lane
Plain-language stories. No jargon. 5 posts.
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Groups of 50 Domains and a Fallback Path With a Restored Backup
A change that took days in the systems we controlled became months of waiting for thousands of people to change one small setting.
Migrating customer domains without downtime
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The Rollback Nobody Had Ever Tried Against Four Expired Test Sites
A checklist item read 'rollback exercised once for real'. When we finally ran it, three of the test sites we expected to use had already lost the thing that makes going back possible.
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The One Line We Changed to Rescue a 1,264 Address Audit
A stalled migration audit showed why a second compatible online address lookup can save a day of work.
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Groups of 50 Domains and a Fallback Path With a Restored Backup
A change that took days in the systems we controlled became months of waiting for thousands of people to change one small setting.
Finishing and cleaning up infrastructure migrations
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The Healthy Server That Nobody Could Reach the Next Morning
A small server migration tested clean, then failed completely the next morning with nothing changed. We'd already written the guardrail for this exact problem, for something much bigger.
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A 1.7 GB Folder, a Hidden Pointer, and Eight Open Sessions
A nearly full computer drive turned a simple folder move into a lesson about stopping live work before changing where it is stored.
Technical lane
The build log: the logs, the code, the fix. 20 posts.
Start here
Two alerts, 25 domains, and a monitor watching the wrong sites
At 7:10 a.m., the apex relay health monitor fired. It fired again at 7:30. By 3:38 p.m., we had moved 25 brand domains, including the primary domain, off the old origin server and onto the apex rel...
Migrating customer domains without downtime
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Two alerts, 25 domains, and a monitor watching the wrong sites
At 7:10 a.m., the apex relay health monitor fired. It fired again at 7:30. By 3:38 p.m., we had moved 25 brand domains, including the primary domain, off the old origin server and onto the apex rel...
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Moving Zones in Days While Customer DNS Takes Months
The technical part of an edge migration took days. The human part, moving a long tail of customer-managed DNS without breaking anyone's website, is the part that's still going. Canary batches, a migration board, deadline emails, and a relay with a tested restore.
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Sync-RelayAllowlist.ps1 Deleted Domains That Were Still Live
We told a client their site would be live on the new relay by Friday. Friday came and went.
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Pinning the connection to the old server returned a catch-all certificate and a 404
The plan said any migrated domain could be pointed back at the old server. Three of our test domains had already lost the certificates that made that true, and a status word called disabled talked us out of the browser we needed.
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The local resolver kept serving a stale answer for an hour
We were halfway into a Cloudflare-for-SaaS migration audit when every DNS lookup we depended on failed at once. All of them failed, and they failed instantly.
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Why the API-Enabled Reseller Account Was Useless for DNS Automation
To automate DNS for more than a thousand customer domains, we needed one thing: a GoDaddy API key.
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Three to Six Months of Clicking Versus 19 Domains in a Loop
GoDaddy says there is no API for WWD private-label reseller accounts. There is. Here is how to find it, authenticate with it, and script it for bulk DNS changes.
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A Caddy Relay, a 301, and an Apex Record That Would Not Edit
Our own build runbook confidently told us to flip a DNS record in a specific GoDaddy reseller account. The record wasn't there.
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Cloudflare error 1001 on a site whose CNAME was correct
A per-domain Cloudflare edge flip broke 8 legacy redirect domains. A blast-radius scan built during the migration sized the damage in 12 seconds.
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154 Domain Rows, 94 Accounts Warned, and the Columns We Stopped Trusting
A customer asked who set up their domain, and checking the answer showed our migration tracker was wrong about 85 sites.
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Three Customers Out of 134 Acted on the Migration Email
The alert said 83 domains had migrated to Cloudflare. We checked the underlying dashboard query first, then checked reality, and the two didn't agree.
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A Worker Stalled for 22 Hours and Nothing Complained
Forty tickets in six weeks. A site 'waiting for propagation' that actually needed a cert reissue. Staff screens showing Awaiting DNS on migrated domains. The deliverable of a domain migration is a state machine that tells staff, customers, and the automation the same truth.
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Why 1,282 Custom Hostnames Did Not All Get Retried
At 4:10 PM, a migrated site had the right DNS records and no HTTPS.
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Moving the Apex and www Records Left One Awkward Dependency
At 12:18 AM, we had just moved the apex and www records for a guided customer home onto Cloudflare Pages, with mail still intact, and noticed our status page depended on the same edge network as the thing it was meant to explain.
Finishing and cleaning up infrastructure migrations
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Why We Archived a Repository After the Queue Survived Its Soak
At 2:17 PM, we thought the SMS queue migration had been finished for several days.
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Why Our MCP Endpoint Resolved to a Tunnel We Had Already Retired
Yesterday we moved our knowledge server off a local tunnel and onto a real cloud endpoint. Same MCP tools, same agent, new address. We ran a full session against it.
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What We Learned Clearing 65 Expired Domains From the Backlog
There were 65 expired domains sitting in the backlog when we shipped the teardown process on June 24. Clearing them was the visible part.
Migrations that turn into bigger decisions
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What Silently Dropped When dxdev-blog Folded Into dxdev-landing
Folding dxdev-blog into dxdev-landing was supposed to be content migration. It became schema design, renderer archaeology, and a question about what the public surface of a product should reveal.
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What a Two-Sentence Redirect Ticket Never Said About the Visitor
A redirect ticket concealed a broader user-orientation problem. In this product move, the destination needed context, clear positioning, and a maintained landing surface, not only a URL change.
More in this theme
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