Migrate your Discourse site to hosted Discourse

Documentation Hosted Customers
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If you already have an existing Discourse site, and want to migrate it onto our hosting, this is the guide for you.

For support and security reasons, the Discourse team is involved in all site restorations. To help make the migration as seamless as possible, with minimal downtime, we’ll need to know the answers to the following questions when you contact us:

For an active site:

  1. Where is your site currently hosted?
  2. Do you have any issues updating your site’s Discourse installation to the latest version available? If so, what is the current version?

For a backup taken before a site was shut down:

  1. Where was the site hosted?
  2. What was the version number of the Discourse installation when the backup was taken? If you don’t know, how long ago was the backup taken?

Preparing for your migration

Head over to our pricing and plan comparison page and determine which plan meets your community’s needs, paying special attention to the supported plugins and staff counts. Please be sure to reduce your staff count prior to taking a backup, if needed. See What is a staff user on hosted Discourse? for more information.
:warning: Note: We do not support migrations to our Starter plan.

Start a trial on the appropriate plan. This trial will become your new hosted site.

Dry run, for sites that are currently active

  1. Update your existing site to the latest version of Discourse available. If you’re unable to do so, please let us know what the version number is and that you’re unable to update it.

  2. Take a full backup (including uploads)

    • If you need to enable full uploads from the command line (for S3 uploads), SSH into your server and run the following:
    cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
rails c
SiteSetting.include_s3_uploads_in_backups = true
exit
exit

  3. Upload the backup file to your new hosted site.

  4. Contact us at team@discourse.org to let us know the following:

    • You’re interested in migrating your Discourse site to our hosting
    • You’ve followed the steps in this guide and have uploaded the backup to your new hosted site
    • The backup’s filename
    • The current url of your new hosted site
    • The site’s previous host and version number

  5. We’ll restore the backup on the new hosted site and let you know how long to expect the actual migration to take

  6. Once we have the backup restored, look around and make sure everything looks good.

When you’ve confirmed the dry run went well and we have an understanding of how long the back-up restoration will take, let us know when you’d like to schedule the actual migration. Your active site will need to be in read-only mode from just before you take a fresh backup until the DNS change is complete.

Migration Steps for sites that are currently active

  1. If you’re keeping your current site’s URL, log into your domain registrar and lower the DNS TTL as low as possible for the current hostname to shorten transition time
  2. Update your site to the latest version of Discourse available
  3. Enable read-only mode on your site from the /admin/backups page
  4. Take a full backup (including uploads)
  5. Upload the backup to your new hosted site
  6. Let us know when that’s done, provide the new backup’s filename, and we’ll restore the backup on the new hosted site
  7. Once we have the backup restored, look around and make sure everything looks good.
  8. Update DNS - we’ll give you specific instructions after the new hosted site has been created
  9. Update the new hosted site’s domain name from the /admin page, using the Change Domain Name button.
  10. Make sure everything is working

Migration Steps when the backup is from a site that has already been shut down

  1. If you’re re-using your prior site’s URL, log into your domain registrar and lower the DNS TTL as low as possible for the current hostname to shorten transition time
  2. Upload the backup to your new hosted site
  3. Contact us at team@discourse.org to let us know the following:
    • You’re interested in migrating your Discourse site to our hosting
    • You’ve followed the steps in this guide and have uploaded the backup to your new hosted site
    • The backup’s filename
    • The current url of your new hosted site
    • The site’s previous host and version number
  4. We’ll restore the backup on the new hosted site
  5. Once we have the backup restored, look around and make sure everything looks good.
  6. Update DNS - we’ll give you specific instructions after the new hosted site has been created
  7. Update the new hosted site’s domain name from the /admin page, using the Change Domain Name button.
  8. Make sure everything is working

Last edited by @southpaw 2025-07-23T13:26:07Z

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