The first step in our comprehensive process is to analyze your current forum. Forum addons containing data not covered by normal migration are identified and a plan of action determined, ad placements requiring manual copying are determined, and other needs specific to your current installation is compiled into a project plan for your approval.
An initial backup of your data is made to ensure we can rollback any time in the process. Additionally, this comes in handy should you need to reference your original forum site in the future. During the process of migration, we'll also make other backups so any stage of the migration can be rolled back.
Your forum migration takes place on your server, or in some cases the installation is copied to one of our staging servers. If on our servers, you will be given access to a password-protected directory to view the duplicate installation. Our staging servers are specially built to handle migrations from small forums to those containing tens of millions of posts. The database server is configured with optimizations specific to data duplication tasks. We match your current environment using the version of PHP used on your current environment.
This, along with our customized import program, results in faster data migration and the ability to closely identify, analyze, and mitigate any data issues which might arise. Migration speeds on our staging environment typically take a fraction of the time they require on our client's systems. It also ensures no data will be changed on your live website. We do a complete initial migration on these servers along with any changes requested to the theme and operation of the new forums.
Once this initial import is complete you and your forum staff can browse the site on the new forum software without risk, suggest any changes to be made to the look and operation, and approve the project for final migration. Once approved, we'll schedule a time convenient for you to do the final migration. In order to ensure the final migration is 100% consistent with new users, posts, threads, private messages and other user content on your live site, your site will be placed in "read-only" mode during the next step.
An initial backup of your data is made to ensure we can rollback any time in the process. Additionally, this comes in handy should you need to reference your original forum site in the future. During the process of migration, we'll also make other backups so any stage of the migration can be rolled back.
Your forum migration takes place on your server, or in some cases the installation is copied to one of our staging servers. If on our servers, you will be given access to a password-protected directory to view the duplicate installation. Our staging servers are specially built to handle migrations from small forums to those containing tens of millions of posts. The database server is configured with optimizations specific to data duplication tasks. We match your current environment using the version of PHP used on your current environment.
This, along with our customized import program, results in faster data migration and the ability to closely identify, analyze, and mitigate any data issues which might arise. Migration speeds on our staging environment typically take a fraction of the time they require on our client's systems. It also ensures no data will be changed on your live website. We do a complete initial migration on these servers along with any changes requested to the theme and operation of the new forums.
Once this initial import is complete you and your forum staff can browse the site on the new forum software without risk, suggest any changes to be made to the look and operation, and approve the project for final migration. Once approved, we'll schedule a time convenient for you to do the final migration. In order to ensure the final migration is 100% consistent with new users, posts, threads, private messages and other user content on your live site, your site will be placed in "read-only" mode during the next step.
