Migrating vBulletin question

[hotdogcooker]

Hi all,
I wish I just knew how everything worked with vBulletin from the start but, in the first place I did not understand how you start a vBulletin forum in the first place (which kind of server to use).

So I learned that you can start with shared web hosting, until the forum is big enough that you need a VPS.

But my question now is, how do you migrate a vBulletin forum while people are posting stuff hourly?.

Also, how do you know know for sure when a forum can't last any longer on a Shared Web Host?.

Thanks in advance for any tips and my apologies for not already knowing these things.

[Dave]

1. You disable your forum, take a backup of your database/files and move it over to the new host, change the A records of your domain and enable your forum on the new host.

2. You know a forum can't last any longer on a shared web host if you start noticing that your forum is slow (especially when you have many users online at the same time), reaching the maximum amount of bandwidth, using too many resources on the host.

[Brad Padgett]

Cooker, dave is right.

There is no need to re-install.

Just make sure you take a back up of all your files and database, re-upload your vbulletin folder with all your files.

Then go to phpmyAdmin. Import your database from mySQL (this is fairly simple to do).

After that, all you need to do is like dave said, point your domain to your new nameservers and then simply proceed to go to your old forum url. It will be up and running as if it was always there.

Now, also would like to suggest you give cloudflare a try to protect your website. It's free and some shared host already have it installed. To install it on a vps simply go to the website and point your nameservers to the ones they give you. (you can also install it to your vps using an api key they provide)

If ever you have any DDoS problems or issues of an attack. This will in most cases protect your website from coming offline.

Hope that helped. Have a wonderful day cooker