Server discrepancies

[de.Lici.ous]

The strangest thing happened to me today. I've redesigned a website that was made at least 6 years ago, so it was terribly outdated. The company that it was hosted with are basically no longer in operation. I guess some of their servers were still running, as the old site was still live, but the cpanel did not exist anymore so it was impossible for me to check out anything on the old host.

The domain host was still current so I purchased new hosting and changed the name servers on the domain and waited for it to propagate. I had pre-loaded all the new website files to the new host so as soon as it switched over the new site would be live.

A couple hours later I noticed the new site was live so I started the job of submitting it to Google for crawling. A few minutes later, the cpanel on the new host wouldn't load, and the site had reverted back to the old site. It continued to switch back and forth between the old and new hosts for a couple of hours.

It now seems to have finally settled down with the new host, but it was the strangest thing and didn't make any sense to me... Once I'd changed the name servers, the domain should no longer have had any connection to the old host and servers. Has anyone ever had issues like this, or know why the servers would behave this way?  

[Lychee Fruit]

Sounds like the website was so accustomed to the way it once was, it wasn't quite ready to change. ^^  

[scrub]

Old database references could now be moot or ******** up now it's on a different server.
Honestly I can't be sure but that's the most likely thing to break from moving a website.  

[de.Lici.ous]

scrub

Old database references could now be moot or ******** up now it's on a different server.
Honestly I can't be sure but that's the most likely thing to break from moving a website.

What do you mean? Once the name servers are changed, shouldn't it cut all ties with the old server?

I would have preferred to get on the old host and remove all the files myself, but it was impossible. It wouldn't have been possible to do a 301 redirect when the domain was remaining the same, would it?