NHS Food-Diary App Migration Derailed by Ignored Docs and Antivirus SSL Confusion

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A solo developer undertaking a hosting migration for an NHS food-diary proof-of-concept encountered repeated setbacks stemming from a decisions log that was never consulted. GitHub Pages had already been evaluated and rejected early in the project, yet it was proposed again days later by the same process, a mistake the existing documentation could have prevented. The SSL troubleshooting was complicated by a false positive: the developer's own antivirus software was intercepting certificate checks, making a resolved DNS issue appear unresolved until verified via a phone or server-side tool. Separate real issues included SSH being disabled by default on the shared hosting provider and a control panel quirk that surfaced once both hosts were synchronised. The migration ultimately concluded without a technical breakthrough — the key decisions were made by the project owner outside formal review sessions, and the two main failures were process-related rather than code-related.

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