Migrating from a foreign host to Indian infrastructure
Practical playbook for moving a WordPress or ERPNext site from a US/EU host to Palitana, Gujarat. DNS cut-over, certificate rotation, and the two-week post-migration checklist.
If you are running a production workload on a US or EU host and your primary customers live in India, the latency, the FX risk on your invoice, and the legal-jurisdiction gap under DPDPA 2023 are all real costs. This post walks through the mechanics of moving to Indian infrastructure without taking your site offline.
Before you start
Take a baseline. Screenshot your current p95 latency from the host’s dashboard. Note your monthly bandwidth + storage usage. Export your database (mysqldump / pg_dump / mariadb-dump). Save your SSL certificate private key + the intermediate cert. List every cron job + every external service your app talks to (SMTP, S3, payment gateway, analytics).
You will need all of this to verify the cut-over was lossless.
Step 1 - Provision the new instance
Message us on WhatsApp with your expected traffic + storage. We pick the right plan (Apps T2 for a small WordPress, Apps T5 for a busy one, Linux Dedicated for ERPNext over 50k monthly visits). We provision the container + database + object storage + SSL within 4 hours.
Step 2 - Move the data
scp the application files + the database dump to the new
container. Restore the dump to the new database. Run your
smoke tests in a staging branch before flipping DNS.
Step 3 - Cut over DNS
Lower your existing DNS TTL to 60 seconds at least 24 hours before the cut-over (so the global TTL expires before you change the A record). At the cut-over time:
- Update the A / AAAA record to point at the Palitana load-balancer IP (we send this with the cut-over email).
- Watch the traffic graphs in both old + new dashboards for the next hour. Expect a 30-minute tail of stragglers using the old IP.
- Issue a fresh Let’s Encrypt certificate on the new container. The previous one was signed by your old host’s ACME client; let it expire naturally.
Step 4 - Post-migration checklist
For the next two weeks, watch:
- DNS resolution from major Indian ISPs (Jio, Airtel, BSNL).
- SSL chain validation from a clean client.
- Database connection-pool saturation (a misconfigured new pool is the #1 cause of “site is down for the first 24 hours after migration” reports).
- Any external webhook that was pinned to the old IP.
We run a free post-migration health check at day 7 + day 14. Message us on WhatsApp to book the slot.