A live e-commerce site brought back from the dead - migrated, debugged, and fully restored after a hosting move left it completely offline.
A broken migration, rebuilt to fully working - with every customer's purchase history intact
After Rattenkrieg's storefront was moved to a new host, it went completely dark - every visitor hit an "Internal Server Error," and the customer login system that gates purchased game credits was dead. We diagnosed the site layer by layer instead of rebuilding from scratch: restoring missing framework files, correcting every scrambled database connection, and untangling a credit system that had been reading data across two separate stores. The result is a fully live site where customers can log in and see the exact credits they paid for, with not a single purchase record lost in the process.
The Highlights
Six specific problems from the live recovery that we'd point to as proof of the work.
From "Internal Server Error" to a working homepage
Diagnosis
The site greeted every visitor with a blank server error. We traced it through the hosting layer - a leftover configuration line from the old server incompatible with the new one, an outdated routing setup, and a stray debug line left in the site's core file that was halting the entire application before it could start.
The right software environment
Diagnosis
The new host had auto-upgraded the site to a modern software version its older codebase simply couldn't run on, producing a flood of errors. We identified the exact compatible version and pinned it, instantly clearing hundreds of errors at once.
Restoring the missing pieces
Diagnosis
The migration had silently failed to copy several essential framework files - the site's session handler and its entire database engine were simply gone. We restored them from the exact matching version of the framework, file for file.
Reconnecting three databases
Diagnosis
The site actually relies on three separate databases - the main store, a copy of historical purchase records, and the blog. Every one was pointing at credentials from the old server. We remapped each connection to the new host and, in the process, rotated passwords that had been sitting exposed in plain text.
Rescuing the customer credit system
Diagnosis
The login worked, but the feature that mattered most - showing each customer the credits they'd bought - was silently returning nothing. We traced it through the purchase-history data, confirmed every customer's orders had survived the move, and reconnected the logic that turns past purchases into available credits.
A roadmap, not just a patch
Diagnosis
With the site live, we documented what was fixed, flagged the security and future-proofing issues we found along the way, and mapped out the bigger decision ahead: how the credit system should work once the connected store finishes its own move to a new platform.
Site down after a migration?
We can help. No obligation.