Writing the host-exit runbook before you need it

Writing the host-exit runbook before you need it
Heard this week: a team scrambling to leave a degraded host with no plan, losing a weekend they'll never bill. The insiders keep a cold runbook ready:
— Pre-document the full migration steps while everything's calm and access is good.
— List exactly what to export and in what order, with where it lives.
— Name the backup host you'd move to today, pre-vetted.
— Record current DNS, TTLs, and email routing so you're not reverse-engineering at 3am.
— Define the single trigger that makes you pull the cord — a metric, not a mood.
A source tells us the teams that exit clean wrote the runbook months before the host gave them a reason.
Watch this: the calm time to plan your exit is right after the acquisition, not after the outage.