Akilanews is one of Gujarat's leading news websites, publishing around the clock with heavy daily traffic. Its hosting setup has five parts: a load balancer, a Node.js application, an Angular website, a MongoDB database, and an admin panel. Since news traffic never really stops, we moved everything to new cloud hosting while the website stayed fully live — no downtime, no scheduled maintenance window.
Most website migrations get a low-traffic window to work in. A news website doesn't — breaking news doesn't wait for 3am, and Akilanews' traffic reflects that. All five parts of the site — the load balancer, the website itself, the Node.js application, the MongoDB database, and the admin panel — had to move together, live, without ever sending a reader to a half-finished server.
The harder problem: a website can look fine and still be broken. A server can report that everything is running normally while visitors actually see broken or incomplete pages — which is exactly what happened here, and exactly the kind of problem a quick check after migration won't catch.
Some hosting platforms hide their network settings from the team using them. That's exactly what let a database stay openly reachable without anyone noticing.
A website with five connected parts needs direct control over server routing and setup — control that platform-style hosting often takes away for the sake of simplicity.
Server settings, file paths and internal addresses often end up tied to one hosting platform's own setup — exactly what had to be found and rebuilt here.
Moving a live website without downtime takes careful planning, not luck. Here is exactly how our team handled this Node.js, Angular, and MongoDB migration, step by step.
This website has five connected parts: the load balancer, the Angular frontend, the Node.js application, the MongoDB database, and the admin panel. We moved all five together, in one migration. Traffic was switched over in careful stages, so no visitor was ever sent to a server that wasn't fully ready.
The NGINX load balancer had the old server addresses saved in its settings. We updated those settings so every incoming request reached the correct new server, from the very first day of the migration.
After the move, the Node.js application and the Angular frontend started from the wrong folder on the new server. The server reported everything as normal, but visitors saw broken pages. Our team traced this back to the startup configuration and corrected it, so the website loaded correctly for every visitor.
The MongoDB database's log file grew to 36GB and filled up the server's disk space. We traced this to a missing database index, which forced MongoDB to scan far more data than needed on every request. We added the correct index and set up automatic log cleanup, so the same issue cannot happen again.
The old MongoDB database had no password requirement and could be reached from the open internet. Our team rebuilt its security settings from scratch — requiring a password to connect, and allowing access only from trusted servers.
Before marking the migration complete, we load-tested the website's page-rendering process using real traffic patterns. This step matters because a server can pass every basic health check while still showing broken pages to real visitors.
A basic server check only confirms that a process started. It doesn't confirm the website can find its files or load correctly. On this migration, the website's application started successfully from the wrong folder — every basic check passed, and the site was still broken for readers.
This wasn't something we were looking for, but it's the most important thing we found: the old database had no password requirement and was reachable from the open internet. A gap like this often stays hidden until someone actually checks for it during a migration.
A migration is a good moment to check your security settings, not just move them as-is. If you're not sure whether your database is exposed, it's worth checking — whether or not you're planning a migration.
The whole website moved to new cloud hosting with no downtime, even during a busy news cycle. As a bonus, the database ended up more secure than before, with a repeating storage problem fixed for good. Akilanews came out of this migration in better shape than it started.
"The migration was extremely smooth and well coordinated. All our services are running perfectly, and even our visitors didn’t notice that the migration had taken place. The AccuWeb.Cloud team handled the entire cloud migration professionally, with excellent support, communication, and coordination throughout the process. The transition was seamless, with no disruption to our website or users, and we’re very happy with the performance and reliability of the new cloud environment."
Tell us about your website and your traffic. An engineer will write back with a plan for moving it live, built around your actual traffic — not a generic overnight window that doesn't work for you.
