All posts
Engineeringmigrationwireguardnetworking

Relocate to a new IP in one click

Changing a server's IP usually breaks a dozen hard-coded references. The WireGuard-overlay insight makes relocation clean — only public refs rewrite, internal ones stay stable.

Sevak Girard· Founder, Girard Media·Jun 16, 2026·1 min read

The scariest part of moving a server isn't copying the data — it's the IP. Hard-coded addresses hide in service configs, database connection strings, webhook URLs, reverse-proxy rules, and TLS certificates. Miss one and the new box comes up half-broken.

HostSSH's managed migration rewrites the IP for you. The trick that makes it clean is an architectural one.

The WireGuard-overlay insight

Split every IP reference into two kinds:

  • Internal references — services talking to each other (app → database, proxy → backend).
  • Public references — the outside world reaching the box (DNS A records, public webhooks).

If internal services address each other over a WireGuard overlay (10.10.0.x), those addresses are IP-stable: they don't change when the public IP does. So relocation only has to rewrite the public references — a much smaller, well-defined set.

# Relocate a server to a fresh VPS, rewriting the public IP automatically
hostssh migrate --new-ip --target provision:hetzner/cx32

What the migration actually does

  1. Provision a fresh VPS (through HostSSH or your own credentials).
  2. Install the agent + engine and restore the brain, databases, and volumes.
  3. Rewrite public IP references deterministically — and only those.
  4. Bring up sidecars, reissue TLS, and optionally flip DNS.
  5. Verify: row counts match, domains return 200, certificates are valid — a single green card.

Why one click matters

This is the real Girard Media use case: a three-year VPS renewal, a provider switch, a disaster recovery. Each used to be a tense manual migration. Now it's: pick the source image, pick the target, watch the checklist self-complete, cut DNS, decommission the old box.

Relocation stops being the thing you dread and becomes a button you press.