Forum downtime

Hi there,

I'm going to move to a new webhosting service. Actually, I already have the new webhosting service arranged, but the forum is still on the old hosting provider currently.

I'm not sure when I will migrate everything just yet. I will have to make some changes and I do plan to make things as seamlessly as possible. But it is impossible to do this without a moment where I have to put the forum in read-only mode, and depending on how long the database transfer takes and how long it takes for DNS to catch up afterwards, the expected downtime is going to be between half an hour and an hour.

Because I already know this is going to happen somewhere in december, I thought to let you know in advance. I will be on Discord during the migration too, so you can ask for support in case things are not working for you after an hour. Once I know exactly when I will be migrating, I will post an update here too, and one once the migration is done.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

That's all fine by me. How come you're moving to a new host, if I may ask?

My current hoster decided in januari to increase the prices to double what I paid before, but I had renewed with 3 years, so it did not apply to me yet, but it had kept me thinking. Double the price was still somewhat acceptable, but they are going to increase the price from the new price to 250% again before my contract is to be renewed, which makes it a really expensive option suddenly. So I get a price increase of 500% between contracts.

My contract is due somewhere in 2021, but I host lots of stuff, so I have a lot of work ahead.

I can get way cheaper hosting than that, so I'm leaving them.

If all goes well, I may migrate the forum tomorrow or sunday.

So... after a tedious evening of troubleshooting and migrating, I finally got something working...

The url has changed because of this, but I hope this to be temporary. There is a weird DNS issue where things propagate very slowly, and as a result the database import failed multiple times where I had to resort to splitting it up which caused a problem with the index that I wasn't told about until I upgraded the forum to a newer version... That is when hell broke loose and the forum stopped working.

So I created a new install location in new.nifflas.lp1.nl and performed the whole migration again. This time all went smooth, the way I expected it to go the first time. When I set that to the nifflas.lp1.nl, things started to slow down immediately due to DNS issues. Although DNS seemed to have settled on the right settings now, I still don't want to test it right away. I'll test that tomorrow, If all goes well, I should be able to set things correctly tomorrow. Once all is ready, I'll create another install to test upgrading to SMF 2.0.17 to fix the dissappearing private messages in sent items.

Oh well, that is the life of an ICT geek.

Update...

All signs point that the DNS is fully set now, so I've set the url back to nifflas.lp1.nl and the site is fast without problems. Yay! I'll look into the SMF upgrade tomorrow though...

LPChip out.

So, the forum is fully migrated to the new host now and all is working. I haven't yet worked on the update as I've been very tired from the hard work last night.

In addition, I found out that email is not working properly right now. I'm looking into it, just so you know.