UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Off Topic Changing Webhosts - A tale of great adventure!

So...my site (forums for an online gaming guild) has been sitting at version 6.4.2 of threads for some time. We were using an island hack made by someone before islands came into the main feature list of threads, and even though I was tinkering with the latest threads release, I just hadn't driven myself to force an upgrade on my users in terms of the full scale change of look/feel.

Part of that was due to the island stuff from the hack were slightly different than what came through here, and my main php person has been extremely busy with his own life and I'm more just a trouble shooter type coder...not a "real" one, so I was giving myself plenty of time to try and create the existing content we have in the new version so that people wouldn't feel too put off by the upgrade.

Now, we've also been at a particular webhost for the past 4 years, and we subscribed in 6 month blocks. Over the past year, we'd been getting terrible slowdowns on the forums around midnite pst...and we finally got annoyed enough we decided to look at other hosting. Wow, look at all the much cheaper hosting out there than what we've got, more bandwidth, more server space, more mysql databases and so on. Too bad we'd just paid for another 6 months (back in December). So...over the next few months, our goal was to find new hosting and make the move.

Of course, being a gaming guild and wanting to play games...we let it drag on until earlier this month when I said to myself...hmm...I wonder when the next subscription period goes down. Holy Crap, in 5 days! So, bam! using reviews, etc, we made our choice, got much cheaper hosting for what appears to be better performance and service. We even decide to go with php5 just to feel a bit more modern.

As we begin the transfer this week, I notice some nice errors coming from the php.....do some digging in here and see that the older versions of threads just don't like the way php5 tastes. So...with my old site shutting down this friday, what do I do? Do I ask the host to switch us to php4 and continue with our current forums OR....do I use this as my watershed event to just get off my ass and do the forum upgrade that needed doing. Well, of course I chose the latter....onwards and upwards I say.

So, I figure hey, I'll just do the upgrade on the new site....Ack! No, I can't, because I have to bring myself current to 6.5.5..so.. .I realized the only thing for it was to do the complete upgrade on my old site to get the datatables right, and then move the datatables to the new site. All of this within the past 24 hours....it was very amusing watching the import script importing 20522 topics in 20 increments.....even more fun watching 40k pms get imported, but at least those went by 100.

This isn't bitching, just sharing my tale of "Oh Sh##!" and to push the point of not leaving upgrades for too long

Ah well, I'm happy to be caught up....hey, what the hell....7.2 beta is out....aaagggghhh!!

Well done, you done it the right way by the sound of things

don't jump through all those hoops just yet,
wait until you settle in with your new host

But congrats :pat on back:

I do think this new background colour on the left
does my avatar justice lol

We were forced too to upgrade when we changed hosts.

The new one had a slightly older MySql 4 version so some tables (of our own support scripts) were not compatible at the new host. So we had to go for MySql 5. But ubb.threads 6.x was not MySQL 5 compatible.

In one day we upgraded everything on the old host, uploaded everything at the new place and beside a few DNS problems, we were up and running. All in all, about 9 hours of downtime.