Migrating a growing retailer off shared hosting without downtime

The problem

A growing retail client was running their storefront on shared hosting sized for a much smaller catalogue. Every seasonal sale drove a traffic spike the server couldn’t absorb — the site slowed to a crawl or dropped out entirely at the exact moment buyers were ready to check out, and each incident meant a support ticket into a shared queue with no priority handling.

What we built

We planned and executed a migration to managed cloud infrastructure sized for their real traffic profile, not their average traffic — provisioning headroom for sale-day spikes specifically, plus monitoring and alerting so load issues surface before customers notice them. The cutover itself was scheduled and staged so DNS, SSL and email kept working throughout, with no maintenance-mode window.

The result

99.98% uptime since migration, with zero downtime during peak sale traffic — including through subsequent sale events that would previously have taken the site down. Page response times during traffic spikes improved enough that the client stopped treating “is the site up” as a standing sale-day risk.

Ongoing

We continue to manage this infrastructure directly, with the same team that ran the migration handling day-to-day monitoring and support — no handoff to a separate hosting provider once the project shipped.