Migrating 50 domains manually

Since 2 days I migrate 50 domains from my old provider (Hostinger) to the new one (HostHatch) and I have do ALL manually. I think "it is possible to do that in one weekend" lol. MDR. No.

I start Saturday 9h00. First domain: easy. Second domain: I forget the MX priority, 2 hours to find. Third domain: the DNS it is cached for 6 hours, I wait. Fourth domain: I have make a typo in the SPF, all emails bounce. I discover this Sunday 14h00.

The detail of my hell:

• 23 domains with email (Zoho/Google/self-hosted mix)
• 12 domains with subdomains I forget
• 8 domains with wildcard certificates to reissue
• 5 domains with A/AAAA mismatch I create
• 2 domains where the old registrar lock the transfer

Sunday 23h30 I finish. Monday morning: 3 clients call me "my email it is broken". I have forget the autodiscover CNAME for one. Since 2 days I fix the little problems.

Never again. How you do for not have this pain? I use no tool, just the panel of HostHatch and my fingers.

Anyway I did something similar once at 3am except it was 200 domains and I was moving between two self-hosted bind servers idk why I do this

bash
#!/bin/bash
# 3am migration helper, use at own risk
For domain in $(cat domains.txt); do
dig +short NS $domain
# then I fell asleep and woke up to 40 cron emails
Done

My tip: always lower TTLs 48 hours before. Anything cached becomes your enemy. Also test with `dig @8.8.8.8` not just your local resolver, your local resolver lies to you because it loves you

I read your post and I have to tell you I did this exact thing last year except it was 73 domains and I was moving from Contabo to Hetzner https://www.hetzner.com and I started on friday because I thought I would be done by sunday night and I had oatmeal for breakfast on saturday and my cat sat on the keyboard twice and the weather was rainy so I couldn't even go outside to clear my head and I did everything manually in the cPanel interface and I forgot about the DNSSEC keys on 8 of the domains and then the transfer locked on one because I had just renewed it and I didn't know about the 60 day lock and I was so angry I threw my mouse across the room and my cat ran away and didn't come back for three hours and people on the forum yelled at me for writing too much but I needed to vent and the worst part was the email migration where I had to export 47 mailboxes as pst files and one of them was 47GB and took 8 hours and I didn't start it until 11pm and fell asleep and woke up at 4am and it had finished but then I uploaded it wrong and had to restart and I never want to do this again and now I use terraform for everything and you should too and I will post my config in the next thread because this one is already too long but Seriously automate everything

So, the server it is broken — no, the DNS it is broken, bon, I understand your pain. I have migrate 30 domains last month and "how to say" — the propagation, it is the worst enemy!

The tool I use: the Terraform with the provider DNS. It is more fast than the fingers. The DNSSEC, it is a trap: you must disable before the transfer, then re-enable after. I forget this for 4 domains. 48 hours of pain.

For the email, the autodiscover, the autoconfig, the mobilesync — so many records to forget! I make a checklist now. Before, I forget always something.

Good luck for the little problems since 2 days!

Lucgone I feel you actually I did 30 domains manually too last year and basically wanted to die (´・ω・｀)

My terraform setup changed everything now I just change one file and apply

Hcl
Resource "hosthatch_dns_record" "mx" {
Zone = "example.com"
Name = "@"
Type = "MX"
Value = "10 mail.example.com.com"
Ttl = 300
}

For 50 domains you can use `for_each` and loop through map much more better than clicking around panel

I can share my full config if you want basically the weekend from hell becomes 2 hours