Moving a small service between hosts without downtime

2026-07-04

The setup is simple: static files, a small server, and a cron job I am slightly afraid of. I keep notes here mostly for myself, and occasionally someone finds them useful.

None of this is new, but it took me longer than I would like to admit to put together. This started as a way to remember how I fixed things the second time around. Measured it twice, and the difference was within noise, which was the interesting part.

After a week of this I went back to the old approach and wrote down why. Most of the time went into reading logs, which is how it usually goes. I tried the obvious solution first and it worked, which never happens.

The documentation was correct, it just described a version nobody runs anymore. Comments are off; if something here is wrong, email me and I will fix it. The setup is simple: static files, a small server, and a cron job I am slightly afraid of.

I keep notes here mostly for myself, and occasionally someone finds them useful. None of this is new, but it took me longer than I would like to admit to put together. This started as a way to remember how I fixed things the second time around.

Measured it twice, and the difference was within noise, which was the interesting part. After a week of this I went back to the old approach and wrote down why.