Thinking of upgrading my board..need your 2 cents

[Viks]

Hi,
thanks for reading the post.
I am running vb3.5.2 with no problems or issues. With the new release of vb3.6 and improved Ajax features/support I am thinking of upgrading my forums.

I was wondering if I can get your expert thoughts and opinion on the following issues -

1. Is there a way I can do a test upgrade on my forums WITHOUT touching my production forums first? Is there a way to do that, please suggest me how can i go about doing this and what will be required.

2. If i am able to successfully do this then is there a way to first get all things working and then switch the test board into production?

3. my forum database is almost 1.5 yrs old and it is reaching upto 35MB - is there a way to compact it's size? my isp cost is creeping up!

I will appreciate your response,

Thanks

[DivisionByZero]

to do a test run, just dump your database, create a new database using the dump file, and upgrade it to 3.6.5.

If 35mb of "space" is a factor in determining your hosting costs, i can only assume you're on a shared hosting plan somewhere.

There's many different things you can do to minimize your database size. One of the main responsibilities of a bulletin board administrator is to minimize the workload of the database server. Thus, for starters, if your attachments, avatars and profile pics are being served from the database, you can move them to the filesystem. You can also elect to prune really old threads that nobody visits or replies to anymore, and so on.

What are your hosting plan specs, if i may ask?

[Viks]

thanks for your reply.

Using a database dump - sounds a good idea.

But then what happens to all the mods I installed and all the extra tables those mods have created in the database - i suppose I will have to re-install all of them.

I am on a $9/pm hosting getting upto 100MB of hosting.

Being a patients support forum - a lot of the threads have valuable info and content, i dont think pruning older threads will be an option for me at this time - i dont think members wil appreciate that.

[DivisionByZero]

you might want to consider upgrading to some high-end VPS or dedicated to handle it, if its a problem right now