We have moved from our previous provider, site5.com, to our new host at inmotionhosting.com. The move was mandated for several reasons,
- The cost for hosting became excessive and increased rapidly every year. We might endure another year, but with the current low number of active subscribers, we would face serious trouble in 2024 and later
- In the last months we have been troubled with downtime or intermittent connection time-outs
- When I complained and sent support tickets, Site5 support was either very slow or even non-existent
- We would run out of disk space for images within the foreseeable future
Thus the conclusion was inevitable
I will not trouble our members by details of the site move. Suffice it to say I encountered quite a number of obstacles along the transferral and subsequent debugging of the forum on its new host. 'Small' road blocks such as a different DB server and another version of PHP mean I shall need a renewal of my hair colour many weeks before scheduled time
. Ruth is happy now that she can speak to me and get sensible answers, too ....
Two main points remain;
- All members need to go into their Profile -> Look and layout to change the forum profile. I had to reset to the default during the transfer. The 'Revival' theme is recommended as it will bring back the usual yellow appearance, but feel free to select something else
- I had to remove the Gallery, as this prevented the forum to operate properly. Probably due to some php errors committed either by myself or the coding gurus. Besides, we would need a new license anyway. Members can discuss what to do with this feature now, either add or be without. All uploaded gallery images are present on the new server, though
A few members might need to update their profile names if their name uses 'non-ASCII' characters. Database collation is notoriously tricky when moving a DB to a new site.
Finally, as the new server is more powerful, let us all hope for snappier and more trouble-fee response in the future!!
