How I migrated 16 sites between Linode servers in 1 day with Claude Code

I’ve had an old Linode server hosting my websites now since 2011, and was behind on upgrades and Ubuntu versions, making it harder and harder to upgrade over time. And I had 16+ sites hosted on it across static sites, wordpress sites, and simple django apps. I had wanted to migrate for a while but basically there were a lot of roadblocks.

I was able to migrate the sites in about a day with Claude Code to a new Linode server.

Basically everything was done with markdown files as a starting point. Created a new directory, opened it in Obsidian to track progress. Then started with a simple context file describing what I wanted Claude to do, and build out the plan. We quickly built out planning docs, open questions, reference info, open decisions, etc. I was able to answer the questions and then start on migrating some of the simple static sites first.

I created a new folder for each site to migrate, creating a site migration plan with todos at the top, then once done a readme of how things worked. For this server hosting coding projects I’ve done over 20+ years there was a lot of legacy stuff in many places and it was able to quickly organize and get things working. Basically there were many of these projects where it just would have been too much effort to do and go and fix, and was just able to very quickly fix it, and get several things in a better place than where it started.

The general flow would be to build a site migration plan, decide on open questions and have Claude Code implement the plan. Everything along the way was saved to markdown files, I’d mostly edit in Obsidian, and would use Claude Code via the terminal. Claude would write scripts to check and migrate things between servers, and I would actually run them or verify outputs.

Basically this was mindblowing. I had also discovered some old wordpress vulnerabilities and this was helpful in cleaning that up.

Lots of the sites that I had, even if they were simple broke due to bitrot – just certain files, libraries, or APIs that it references changed or were deprecated over time. We were basically able to fix most of these.

For some of the old Flipside sites where the wordpress themes and servers had gone through many iterations, I was able to find old images, re upload them, update posts many at a time to get things working better. Basically it was good at doing batch operations, but I set it up where I could test and verify with one, then a few, then a larger batch.

Basically this was mindblowing as a project. The workflow sort of combined everything that I would have needed to do between Google, Stack Overflow, the terminal and writing code all in one place and possibly 50-100x times faster. Just crazy. Also it was interesting how much the workflow defaulted to writing bash scripts for these operations, which is not something I’ve ever spent much time doing, but it was very effective at this. It wasn’t totally consistent with workflow style, tried to save some preferences, sessions crashed along the way, but overall, just an awesome use case here.

So could you do this without knowing coding? No, not really. I mean you could ask Claude to do whatever you want but knowing what you are doing, what you want, and why, you rely on this tech knowledge even if the nitty gritty details Claude writes. For me, that’s even cooler, you get less stuck on the minutiae and more of the focus on what you want to do.

In addition, after this was set up, I was also able to get local code files current, with GitHub remotes, and in addition, with a simple post-receive webhook updated for deployments, and then via Claude was able to update the local code, GitHub and push the code live.