Site Migration and Maintenance

[TheoSqua]

After a few years of deliberation, the mod team has decided we are going to move gatewayredbirds to a new host. This new host is one of the more reputable ones in the market, but it's a significantly cheaper package, so there is some risk of GRB being a little slower and our servers being not as reliable. The big thing is we are moving from a dedicated server that is just used by GRB to a shared host where a number of other sites/users will share a server with us.

We feel this is necessary to keep GRB running long-term as the current hosting cost is not sustainable.

In order to start migration I need to do two things:

1.) Upgrade the phpbb software that runs GRB to the latest version.

2.) Get the gatewayredbids.com domain from Michael so we can point it to a new hosting service.

I'm in contact with Michael on #2 and will be working on #1 starting this weekend. Both efforts have the risk of creating outages for GRB, so be warned we may be up and down over the coming weeks.

FInally, to test the new hosting service I procured a new domain: https://www.gatewayredbirds.org. This domain will be secondary and mostly used for testing, But if there are issues with migrating the primary domain, this secondary one should work. So if you come to the site and it doesn't load, you could try the gatewayredbirds.org domain and that one might work.

Thanks!

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Haha! Love the new domain. Let's you know you are home.

[heyzeus]

Also, all the millions in GRBucks I’ve handed out over the years will expire upon migration. You’ll need GRB.orgBucks going forward. A monthly subscription package of $99.99 will get you started, and we will throw in a GKeenan NFT for free.

[Spider John]

I sure hope we don't miss out on discussing any big Cardinal FA signings because of outages.

[sighyoung]

Don't try the migration shortcut equivalent of wintering over in the Sierra Nevadas.

[Leroy]

Can we build a firewall and make northsidebaseball.com pay for it?

[dmarx114]

How much money is needed to keep this site going?

[TheoSqua]

How much money is needed to keep this site going?

Hosting is currently $160 a month. The new hosting is $350 for 3 years then will renew at about $240 a year after that (yay black friday sale). With domains, backups, and other random things this switch should take us from about $2,000 a year to $400.