Holding a global nonprofit's domain together through a live migration

Rise Alliance for Children runs programs for children across Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Haiti, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, the United States and Vietnam. Its funding, its donors and its reputation arrive through one front door: the domain. In the middle of the organisation’s move off wwo.org, that door jammed. The address stopped resolving, and every hour it stayed broken was an hour a global charity effectively did not exist online.

Their managed IT provider, a long-standing client, brought the emergency to us. The failure was the kind that looks trivial from the outside and is anything but: A records fighting the CNAME the migration depended on, leftover entries nobody owned, and a forwarding rule that refused to take while three services disagreed about which of them was in charge. We took the zone apart record by record, removed what conflicted, rebuilt the answer the migration needed, and brought the domain back, forwarding cleanly to the organisation’s new home.

Today wwo.org leads on to rise-children.org, and it has kept working through every stage of the move since. That is the job this entry records: not a website, but the moment a nine-country nonprofit’s identity was handed from one address to another without dropping it. The site you land on is their own; the engineering underneath the transition is ours.

It is also how we like infrastructure work to go: called in when it is already on fire, fixed at the root, and boring ever after.