Rehosting

If you are outgrowing your web host and need a new one but you also want to move your phpBB forum intact, I can help. Note that phpBB provides a help topic on how to do this, so you may want to try this yourself, particularly if you have decent IT skills. In any event it is not a trivial process. Particularly if your board is heavily modded you may want to have it done professionally. I have done this for many clients and have moved my own boards several times.

Some hosts will move you for free or a small charge, so you might want to see what they charge, if anything.

Unfortunately I cannot price the work until I understand what is involved in your particular situation. See my pricing summary to get an idea of the costs involved.

Hosts not recommended

In general, avoid any host that is owned by Endurance International Group. You can see a full list of the companies they own on the Wikipedia page, but some of the better-known brands include: Bluehost, Hostgator, HostMonster, iPage and Site5. For more, see this post.

Recommended hosts

The hosting world is becoming virtual. This means a lot of hosts including GoDaddy and Siteground are actually using a cloud hosting service (Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, in these two cases), essentially outsourcing their server rooms and providing a pretty front end and technical support. This likely saves them a lot of money, but it’s somewhat disingenuous of them because it suggests they are engineering a better technical solution when they aren’t. In general, cloud hosting is very reliable.

As a result of all this turmoil I’ve removed my affiliate links for Siteground and Rackspace.

You might want to host with a major cloud host. In most cases you get almost no technical support and must have a lot of technical skills to use them. This is how virtual hosts add value.

For shared hosting, I can generally recommend DreamHost. They don’t have strict limits on file space, bandwidth size or database size, but the shared plan does have a limit of 100 emails per hour. You might want to read my review of DreamHost. As with all hosting, you should be careful to select the right plan for your needs. As of this writing, they are not a virtual host and their technical support is very good.

If you choose DreamHost, please use my affiliate link. You won’t pay extra.

Rehosting procedures

These are generally the steps I follow to rehost:

  1. Verify that I have the accesses I need on the current and new web hosts
  2. I back up files and databases on the old host and disable the board (unless you want to do a test run first)
  3. I copy over your current phpBB software (with mods or extensions) intact and install on new host. This way if you have mods, unusual styles, etc. I don’t lose any functionality.
  4. I create a new database on the new host for the forum
  5. I export your database and move it over to see if I can get it working at all on the new host in a “test” mode. Sometimes the export available in the phpBB control panel will suffice. For larger databases I usually have to go into MySQL itself and dump your database to a file, which is why I sometimes need SSH access.
  6. I configure the new host config.php and related files to work with the new database
  7. I verify that it looks and behave the same. I will have you verify that all the posts, topics, forums and users are there and the styles are correct.
  8. When you are satisfied:
    1. If we were doing a test run, I’ll run through the process again, this time for real, disabling the board so no posts are lost
    2. Change the nameservers to point to your new host. I can do this for you or you can do it yourself. To do it for you, I need access to your domain registrar.

Once the domain switches everything should appear the same to your users. Generally it takes at least a few hours to propagate a change to the domain. It is better to assume a full day for the switchover for all your forum users.

As you can see this process is time consuming and somewhat cumbersome. The whole thing can easily take a couple days.

How to get started

I suggest sending me a service inquiry.

Last updated April 20, 2021