We have a long-running vB 4.0 forum that we’d like to migrate to Discourse. This is a legacy community, so traffic isn’t anything crazy anymore (damn you Facebook!) but stats are:
Threads 279,185 Posts 4,593,429 Members 29,946
Several years ago we approached someone from this community to see what it would take to do this, but his assessment at the time was that our database was too big for Discourse. He simply didn’t know how things would work out since a migration of our size hadn’t been done. So we decided back then to keep things on vB 4.0. Fast forward to today and it looks like several forums of our size have been moved to Discourse without any real issues, so we’re putting our project out there again!
When do you need it done?
ASAP; we’re flexible but we want as little downtime as possible!
What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task?
We realize this is a large task and are prepared to pay several thousand dollars to complete it. I’d like to discuss specific quotes with those interested. We’d really like to work with someone who wouldn’t mind direct phone calls, who can provide examples of similar work and someone who would be interested in further project support as needed.
We’re hosted with a service owned by one of our long time community members. 12+ years or so. This had many advantages years ago when traffic was much higher, but over the years as things have slowed we’ve slowly paired back our hosting package with him. So we’re open to changing hosts if that simplifies things.
The reason I was asking is that if you were talking about migrating to a plan that we host then in most circumstances we would do the migration for you. If not, then you’ll need a contractor.
Ah gotcha! I did see that you include migration with hosting however I’m anticipating it might not be a straight forward process.
We have one database. But we run a long-ago unsupported vB mod that allows for some forums to appear visually as if they’re stand alone websites. We have several domain names that define these sites. I think we’ll need some support deconstructing things so that a migration goes smoothly. I have a broad idea of how to do this, but would the Discourse team be available to support us with this?
That’s why I requested someone who could be available for direct calls
I have migrated a database a quarter of that size, (see this thread), I found that it took a 8 core VPS, around 8GB of RAM (the server had 32GB but it didn’t use it all), lots of disk space and 50 hours for the import script to run, so I would anticipate that more cores and longer would be needed. I would be available to help you with this job at hourly rate here and wouldn’t charge for the VPS used for the migration, I would need the MySQL database and would provide a Discourse backup file to be restored on your server (either via a HTTPS download or it could be SCP’d to your server, this might be best since it could be around 1GB in size, depending on the quantity of images embedded in the database). Get in touch either here of via our contact page if you are interested.
