Hi everyone,
I mentioned back in January that I'd been considering moving the forums to the Amazon Cloud as costs were generally lower and we could more easily scale resources.
As a result of staff discussion, we have instead decided to move to Digital Ocean, which is even cheaper than Amazon Cloud and also has a (in my opinion) cleaner management interface to work with.
In addition to the move, we will be upgrading the forums to the latest version of MyBB, which will unfortunately mean a few (hopefully temporary) changes to the forum operation:
Firstly, the current theme will have to be scrapped as there isn't a version of it available which matches the new MyBB features. However I have been spending time modifying the default theme so it will resemble our current one as much as possible.
Secondly, unfortunately a number of the additional features we use are not compatible with the latest version of MyBB, so they will have to be disabled. This includes the shoutbox and possibly the kudos system. As much as I know these features are enjoyed, we may have to live without them for a while, though it is my intention to have them replaced as soon as possible.
Thirdly and finally, the server we are moving to is not as powerful as the current one, though we never used the full ability of the current one. I have estimated the resources the forum needs, so I'm hoping we won't run into any problems, but be prepared for some possible downtime.
I'm hoping to migrate the forums over this weekend at some point. The whole process may take a couple of hours, and the DNS change may take longer. See you on the other side!
I mentioned back in January that I'd been considering moving the forums to the Amazon Cloud as costs were generally lower and we could more easily scale resources.
As a result of staff discussion, we have instead decided to move to Digital Ocean, which is even cheaper than Amazon Cloud and also has a (in my opinion) cleaner management interface to work with.
In addition to the move, we will be upgrading the forums to the latest version of MyBB, which will unfortunately mean a few (hopefully temporary) changes to the forum operation:
Firstly, the current theme will have to be scrapped as there isn't a version of it available which matches the new MyBB features. However I have been spending time modifying the default theme so it will resemble our current one as much as possible.
Secondly, unfortunately a number of the additional features we use are not compatible with the latest version of MyBB, so they will have to be disabled. This includes the shoutbox and possibly the kudos system. As much as I know these features are enjoyed, we may have to live without them for a while, though it is my intention to have them replaced as soon as possible.
Thirdly and finally, the server we are moving to is not as powerful as the current one, though we never used the full ability of the current one. I have estimated the resources the forum needs, so I'm hoping we won't run into any problems, but be prepared for some possible downtime.
I'm hoping to migrate the forums over this weekend at some point. The whole process may take a couple of hours, and the DNS change may take longer. See you on the other side!
