What to look for in a VB host?
 

My current host is no longer going to support hosting VB and is only going to allow Wordpress installs on its platform. So I need to move my VB 4.2.5 to another host. This is a bit overwhelming for me and I'm not sure where to start.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what to look for? This forum I have has a lot of paid subscriptions and reliability is a huge factor for me. I believe the forum gets about 2-3 million page views per year. No plugins or customizations are installed.

I'm currently already running PHP 7.0 on a Linux Server. I believe my version of MYSQL is 5.6.

Any thoughts or advice would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Posted this over in the VB4 forum, but then realized it might be better suited for here.

My current host is no longer going to support hosting VB and is only going to allow Wordpress installs on its platform. So I need to move my VB 4.2.5 to another host. This is a bit overwhelming for me and I'm not sure where to start.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what to look for? This forum I have has a lot of paid subscriptions and reliability is a huge factor for me. I believe the forum gets about 2-3 million page views per year. No plugins or customizations are installed.

I'm currently already running PHP 7.0 on a Linux Server. I believe my version of MYSQL is 5.6.

Any thoughts or advice would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

URLJet (now I guess merged with Homepage Universe) has been great for us. We have been with them for 7-8 years. They have excellent customer support and have always taken good care of us. They specialize in hosting vBulletin forums. They will do a lot as far as helping migrate and with upgrades.

What versions of VB are you hosting with them? Do you have a link?

Are you looking specifically for a company that hosts vBulletin forums?
You can just get a VPS at a company such as Vultr, Digitalocean or Linode.

Dave, would love to chat offline with you sometime. What's the best way to get in touch?

And yes, just looking to move my vBulletin install, not the Wordpress.

You should be looking at getting a vps that has reliable uptime, good support and has been around for at least 8+ years.

Here's a good place to start looking for good vps servers & deals.
https://lowendbox.com/

And also, remember what your ram, disk usage & bandwith usages are before you make the switch so that you can find a host with comparable hardware.

Is it commonplace for the new host to move the site over or is that something I would need to handle on my own?

You should be prepared to move the site on your own. Just make sure you have everything setup and ready on the new host before you point your domain to the new servers ip addresses.

Some hosts don't mind doing this since:
1. You're a new customer and they want your business.
2. If you're paying for Part or fully "Managed" support, so the service is included anyway.

Do you know if you're going from a specific software to software? Such as CPanel to CPanel, those transitions are the easiest. You or your host, should be able to just run a CPanel backup, then import it to the new one.

But if you're transferring across different platforms, then it's more work since it's not as automated.