Three sites and their mail moved between hosts overnight

Two association sites, a community subdomain, and a set of subdomains that only redirect, moved to a new host with the DNS switched over in the middle of the night and the mail pointed at Google.

The objective

The client manages sites for an association and needed two of them moved to new hosting. While looking through the account they found a third site nobody had mentioned, which also had to come across as a subdomain.

Several other subdomains existed as Google properties rather than on the server, and had to keep resolving afterwards.

Mail mattered as much as the sites. Every address was to end up on Google Workspace, and on one of the two domains the MX records at the old host had never been pointed at Google in the first place.

The data turned out larger than either of us expected, over five gigabytes, which is enough for a first copy to run long and for an incomplete copy to look finished.

What I did

I moved the sites, then checked what had actually arrived rather than trusting the first pass. Files were missing, so I ran it again before any DNS was touched.

I held the DNS change until the middle of the night in the client's timezone, at their request, so the switch happened while the sites were quiet.

I set the MX records for both domains to Google, including the domain that had never been set correctly.

I added redirects for the subdomains that weren't moving, so their existing links kept resolving.

And I sent a written list of which sites were transferred, which were redirected and which were deliberately left alone, so the client could answer their own client without coming back to me.

The result

The sites and their mail were running on the new host by the next morning. Thirteen orders with this client in total.