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’ve developed the following process:
- Sign up for a trial on the correct tier at discourse.org/buy (site owner)
- Update your site to the latest version of Discourse available (site owner)
- If this is not possible, please be sure to let the Discourse team know so we can plan.
- Lower DNS TTL as low as possible for current hostname to shorten transition time, and wait for at least as long as the previous TTL. For example, if TTL was 24h, wait 24 hours before continuing. (site owner)
All steps up to this point can be completed anytime before the migration. Once you complete the above steps, reach out to the Discourse team via email at team@discourse.org, letting us know you’re looking to migrate an existing Discourse site, and have followed this guide. We’ll coordinate a time with you to complete the steps below.
- Enable read-only mode on your site (site owner)
- Take a full backup (including files) (site owner)
- Upload the backup to your new hosted site and provide Discourse team with full backup filename (site owner)
- Restore backup on new site (Discourse team)
- Update DNS - specific instructions will be provided once the hosted site is created (site owner)
- Add new domain name to site (Discourse team)
- Make sure everything is working (both)