[deanhills]

I guess you could do the DNS change bit at the end. That way the it will remain up throughout the whole process. May put  in read only mode for the time period as a safety concern.
Then you could call it a seamless migration. ha ha

True! Yesterday was a very intense Frihost day - realized how personally involved I'd been with Frihost.com. Forum went under in May 2018 and finally the server came to an end on Valentine's day of all days. When I checked yesterday morning the root of the server had been reloaded with a new OS, password changed and I'd been basically kicked out. The Forum below was on the server, so my brains were all scattered when I was trying a move that should have been as simple as the first steps above.

http://frihost.club

Frihost was my first ever Forum account. Very archaic but very special. phpBB is also archaic vs myBB but much more user-friendly once one gets the hang of the extensions. I chose phpBB as that is what the original frihost forum had been created in. phpBB2 - but almost unrecognizable as Bondings had completely recoded it with his own host panel, used it with a free version of DirectAdmin. If he had patented the coded version, it could have earned him lots of income, except he did it as a hobby when he was a student, wanted to learn how to create a web community (he did it very well) and then when he started his "day job" we never saw him again, however he kept sponsoring Frihost Forum and free hosting accounts until the Server's dying day on 14 Feb.