How We Moved a US Healthcare Agency Off a Vendor-Locked Website With Zero Email Downtime

Many small and mid-sized businesses do not actually own their website. A third party built it, hosts it, holds the domain and runs the business email — and every change, however small, means raising a ticket and waiting. This is the story of how we moved City Healthcare Services, a home healthcare provider in the United States, out of exactly that situation without losing a single minute of email.

The situation

City Healthcare Services was running on a legacy website built and hosted by a third-party vendor. That vendor controlled three things the agency depended on every day:

• The domain — the agency's name on the internet was registered in someone else's account.
• The hosting — the site lived on infrastructure the agency could not see or manage.
• The business email — staff inboxes ran through the same vendor relationship.

The practical effects were familiar ones. Content could not be updated without raising a ticket. The site did not properly reflect the agency's accreditation — something that matters a great deal to families and referral partners choosing a care provider. And because the domain, hosting and email were bundled together, leaving the vendor looked risky: get the move wrong and the agency's email could go dark.

What we did, in order

The order of the work was the most important decision in the project. Rebuilding the website was the easy part; making sure nothing broke while control changed hands was the real job.

1. Recovered the domain first

Before touching the site, we recovered the domain and moved its registration into the agency's own account. Whoever controls the domain controls the website and the email, so this came before anything else.

2. Audited and extracted everything

We audited the existing site and extracted every page, article and service description before migration. Nothing was left behind on the old platform, and nothing depended on the old vendor staying cooperative.

3. Rebuilt from scratch rather than porting

Instead of copying an old theme the agency could not maintain, we rebuilt the site properly — services, conditions, careers and referrals — with the accreditation surfaced prominently rather than buried. It runs on Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind, hosted on Vercel, so it is fast, secure and easy to keep current.

4. Separated website email from business email

This was the step that protected the inboxes. We separated transactional email (the messages the website sends, such as referral and contact form notifications, now delivered through Resend) from business email (the staff's day-to-day inboxes). With the two decoupled, the DNS cutover could happen without putting staff email at risk.

The results

• 0 minutes of email downtime during the DNS cutover.
• 100% of assets client-owned — domain, hosting and code repository are all in the agency's name.
• Same-day content changes, where every update used to be a vendor ticket.
• Referral and contact forms with delivery the agency can verify, instead of hoping messages arrived.

Since 2024 we have continued to host, monitor and maintain the platform, handle content and feature changes, and manage the domain and email — so the agency's team spends its time on care rather than on its website.

A checklist for any business owner

If you are not sure whether you are in the same position, ask these questions about your own website:

• Is the domain registered in your name and account, and do you have the login?
• Who owns the hosting account, and could you move it tomorrow if you needed to?
• Does your business email depend on the same company that built your website?
• Do you have a copy of your site's content and code?
• Can you change a phone number or a price on your website the same day?

If the answer to any of these is "no" or "I don't know", you are carrying risk you did not choose. It is fixable, and it does not have to be disruptive — the order of the steps matters more than the size of the job.

How Leviano approaches this

Every project we take on is set up so that the client owns the code, the domain and the accounts from day one. Clients follow the work in Leviano Trackr, our project portal, every build includes three months of free support after launch, and many clients then keep us on to run their technology so they can focus on the business. If your website, app or business system is stuck behind a vendor you cannot leave, tell us what is going on — we will tell you honestly what it would take to move.