Moving a live news platform without taking it offline
A high-traffic regional news portal ran on an Angular Universal SSR frontend, a Node.js API, a multi-node MongoDB backend, and a separate admin panel — all on shared PaaS infrastructure. We moved the full stack to dedicated cloud instances while the site stayed live.
- • Found a 36GB runaway MongoDB log — caused by missing indexes on a high-write collection, then rebuilt the indexing strategy so it wouldn't fill the disk again.
- • Fixed a broken SSR working directory — Angular Universal stopped rendering server-side right after cutover; traced it to a path assumption that didn't hold on the new host.
- • Phased the DNS and config cutover — across four interdependent services so readers never hit an error page.
- • Locked down MongoDB post-migration — bindip and auth rebuilt from scratch instead of carried over from the old environment.