Case study
Email Migration & Website Recovery
Getting email and the website back online for a five-person welding business after its hosting provider went down.
- Role
- IT Administrator, Ehlert Welding Co., Inc.
- When
- June 2026
- Tools
- Microsoft 365, Exchange Online, Cloudflare, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MFA
The problem
The company's legacy hosting provider had an outage that took down both email and the public website. I was already handling the company's IT, so it was on me to get both working again and keep them running afterward.
What I did
- Migrated business email to Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online, keeping everyone's existing email addresses.
- Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC email authentication and turned on multi-factor authentication.
- Moved DNS management to Cloudflare and configured the records for the website and email.
- Rebuilt and deployed the company website with updated information and a layout that works on phones.
- Took over domain registration, hosting, and HTTPS, and helped staff with issues after the switch.
Outcome
Email and the website are working again, and I still manage both. I also handle day-to-day IT for the office, remotely when I'm at school.
What I learned
Email delivery, the website, and HTTPS all depend on the same set of DNS records, so one mistake shows up everywhere. I also saw why a small business needs to hold the logins for its own domain and services, and that a migration isn't finished until the people using email every day can work normally.