Changing hosts

Couldn't we keep a redirected URL, and a personalized banner on top, or something, as to not lose our branding?
I'm honestly not arguing in favor of merging, I have no position in that regard. Just thinking about possibilities, about how the cons of either option might be attenuated, an so on.
 

fade

Staff member
I read history books. This is going to end up with us declaring war on SpiderForest, isn't it?
 

Dave

Staff member
Couldn't we keep a redirected URL, and a personalized banner on top, or something, as to not lose our branding?
I'm honestly not arguing in favor of merging, I have no position in that regard. Just thinking about possibilities, about how the cons of either option might be attenuated, an so on.
We could, indeed, keep a redirected URL. But one of the things they want is top billing. And they have a logo. How would these mesh?

Again, I have killed NO ideas. If their Admin has different ideas, I'm all for them!
 

Dave

Staff member
We are not on the new host yet. After being down last night and today I've started the process. Once complete, I'm going to have to point the DNS to it, which might take up to 24 hours to propagate. I'll announce when we are going down. Please note that any posts from here on out MAY NOT STAY AND MIGHT DISAPPEAR!!

No longer the case.
 
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Dave

Staff member
And we hit a snag. The cPanel does not access the databases. So I have to try and get access before we can switch anything over. We're still at the old host for now.

The funny part is that we were down because he was making the server switch and didn't tell me.
 
All I know is I don't go into General enough. At least now I know what all the not loading is about now.

Le sigh.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
All I know is I don't go into General enough. At least now I know what all the not loading is about now.

Le sigh.
I almost never go to general, or any other subforum directly. The key is that "Watched theads" and "new posts" are right next to each other on the menu bar. I clear the former, then check the latter. Seems to work well.
 
I almost never go to general, or any other subforum directly. The key is that "Watched theads" and "new posts" are right next to each other on the menu bar. I clear the former, then check the latter. Seems to work well.
I only use the Forum overview to go to the NSFW boards, since they don't show up on New Posts.
 

Dave

Staff member
Either way, an outage today. Different error screen, so new host presumably.

What's up?
Woke up this morning and everything was 404. Asked the host what was up and finally was told that we had a corrupted .htaccess file, which he fixed.

NOT on a new host.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Which seems odd to me... shouldn't a corrupted or invalid .htaccess file cause a 403 error, not a 404?
 
Which seems odd to me... shouldn't a corrupted or invalid .htaccess file cause a 403 error, not a 404?
If the server is supposed to redirect the browser to a given page when an error occurs and it can't find that page, any error would then be turned into a 404 error.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
If the server is supposed to redirect the browser to a given page when an error occurs and it can't find that page, any error would then be turned into a 404 error.
That's not been my experience with my own hosting. Generally it simply returns the errorcode, which the browser interprets to a default errorpage with the number of the error.
 

Dave

Staff member
Well, my email is down again and we still don't have access to our databases. I'm at my wit's end here.
 
If you search for "xenforo database backup" there are a number of xenforo utilities that appear to do full database dumps within xenforo itself.

If you have cpanel acess, you could also load a php mysql admin utility on the server and then do the backups that way. You'd have to get the database info (database name, password, etc) but that should be contained inside the xenforo configuration files which you should have access to via cpanel file manager.
 

Dave

Staff member
Well the backup seems to have done something, even though it says it's a mysqldump. So I'm currently moving the 9.53 GB file to my dropbox and will take a look at it to make sure it's a viable db scrape. If it is, we're in business.
 
Just remember to setup backup on the new host, and download the forum backup once a month or so to test that it still works. It'll prevent your new host from locking you out, and they aren't going to complain about a regular backup.
 

Dave

Staff member
I'm thinking I may have messed up and included the file structure. I was trying to test the db. Hopefully, that 9 GB isn't files.
 

Dave

Staff member
According to the addon dev, this should work regardless as it takes the db reachable by the forum, regardless of where this resides. If that's the case, then we might be in business. Of course, that means having to lock things down - again - transferring stuff and then getting the name servers pointed to the right place, which we all know causes trouble.

I'm also worried about the SSL and what affect this will have.

I'm very, very disappointed in our current host.
 
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