Moving from Nekoweb to Vercel

I moved Shadorux back to Vercel after hosting it on Nekoweb for a while. Nekoweb gave the site a friendly independent-web home, but I wanted a host where the deployment, DNS, crawler access, and rendered output were easier to verify together.

Why I moved back

The biggest reason was crawlability. I wanted ChatGPT-User and other legitimate crawlers to be able to enter the site, while still keeping the domain protected by Cloudflare. Nekoweb's hosting policy made that a poor fit for this goal, so I moved the public site to Vercel and kept the canonical domain at shadorux.dev.

The domain had to move with the files

A migration is not complete when a deployment exists somewhere. I updated the apex DNS record to Vercel, kept www.shadorux.dev pointed at the canonical host, and moved Chaos Radio to its own Vercel deployment too. That means visitors and crawlers now reach the same hosting layer instead of an old Nekoweb origin.

Source code is not live output

I checked the generated files, the Git history, and the live browser separately. A build can succeed while the wrong directory is published. A DNS record can look plausible while still routing to the old host. A crawler can receive a 403 even when robots.txt says it may crawl.

Migration rule

Always test the public URL with the crawler user agent you care about after the host and DNS finish updating. A green deployment is evidence about the deployment, not the visitor's browser.

Removing the last host-specific dependency

The site still had a visitor counter that fetched its number from Nekoweb. Before deleting that account, I replaced the counter with a small static-site counter service so the page would keep working independently. The visible counter can stay in Westopolis without making the whole site depend on the former host.

What I would do before the next move

1. List every hostname and DNS record that points to the old host.
2. Build from a clean, known output directory.
3. Confirm the host is publishing that directory, not a neighboring checkout.
4. Test the apex, www, and important subdomains with a fresh browser context.
5. Check robots.txt, the sitemap, HTML responses, and nested assets.
6. Search the source for old APIs, domains, and host-specific widgets.
7. Only delete the old account after the live site works without it.

The move from Nekoweb to Vercel was less about copying files and more about making the public site independent: one canonical domain, a host that welcomes legitimate crawlers, and enough live verification to know what visitors actually receive.