If you are not technically savvy, are currently hosted on another managed hosting provider, or if you don’t want to get absorbed with all the technical details, we can migrate your Discourse instance to our hosting with minimal effort for you using our “managed migration” process.
Our process looks like this:
Reach out to us
Contact us and tell us about your plans.
Grant Access
First of all, we need access to your existing forum. We need to know the URL of your forum and then we will create an account called Communiteq. If you have an invite-only forum, please invite support (at) communiteq.com. When our account is created, you need to grant it admin permissions.
Create an Empty Forum
In the meanwhile, you need to get a subscription with us and create an empty forum.
Just go to https://www.communiteq.com/discoursehosting/pricing and follow all the steps.
DNS preparation
We will review your DNS settings and if necessary, we will ask you to make some changes to prepare for the migration. If you are not technically savvy, then you can grant us permission to your DNS control panel, and we will take care of this.
Test migration
As soon as we have admin access to your forum, we will perform a test migration by creating a backup and restoring it into the empty forum. We do this in order to ensure that we will not encounter any unexpected issues during the actual migration. We will also make sure that all software and plugin versions match.
Final migration
When the test migration has succeeded, we will plan a date/time for the final migration with you.
At that moment we will do the following:
- set your forum in read only mode
- create a backup
- copy the backup to your new, empty forum
- restore it
- test if everything is ok
Switching the DNS
When the backup has been restored, we will need to switch the DNS to the new host. We have two options here:
- You perform the change in your domain control panel according to our instructions.
- You grant us access to your DNS control panel and we perform the change.
Traffic will now be directed to the new forum. The entire process takes 30 minutes to one hour. During that time, your users will see the “old” forum in read only mode. They will be able to access it, but they cannot post anything.
When applicable, we will also download all uploads from the old hosts CDN and store them locally with your forum.
Migration Complete!
The migration is now complete. In the hours after the migration, we will keep an eye on things to see if there are any unexpected issues, so we can solve them right away.
Let’s do it!
If you have any questions or if you want to get started right away, contact us!