What are the steps and considerations involved in migrating my website to a new

[beatrixweatherby]

I'm in the process of changing the server for my website(removed), and I'm seeking guidance and insights from the community on how to do this effectively. Whether it's about selecting the right hosting provider, transferring data, ensuring minimal downtime, or any other relevant aspects, your experience and knowledge would be greatly appreciated. Please share your expertise to help me navigate this transition smoothly. Thank you for your assistance!

[mickjav]

I have been using https://hostit.host/ for years without issue.

Most host services have a plan for moving sites

I would employ one of the mod developers to get you moved, I always use @Diego Andrés for my site.

All the best mick

[Illori]

https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Hosting_-_How_do_I_move_my_SMF_forum_to_a_different_host

[arlomedia]

I went through this recently and ran into a few obstacles:

• My old host was using MySQL 5.7 and the new host is using MySQL 8. The older MySQL had an automatic query cache function, which the new MySQL doesn't have. This mainly affected some of my other websites and I spent about a week optimizing queries that previously were cached; it could potentially slow down SMF, too.
• The old server had memcache installed and my forum was set to use level 1 caching. This was not installed on the new server, so caching was not activated. I had to install memcached (the newer version of memcache) and then upgrade from SMF 2.0 to 2.1 to be able to activate caching again.
• The old server had PHP 7.3 and the new server has PHP 8 and one of the mods I was using (httpBL) was no longer supported, so I had to uninstall that. (I'm also using Stop Forum Spam, which does still work and fortunately that was the more effective of the two.)
• The new server runs SELinux, which prevents the httpd user from creating or editing files by default. SMF is designed to create and edit a lot of files, including the attachments and custom_avatars directory, the source files when upgrading, and even the Settings.php and Settings_bak.php files. After playing whack-a-mole for a while by trying to grant access to all these locations in SELinux, I gave up and granted system write access to the whole forum directory.

This is probably too late for the original poster, but hopefully it will help someone else.

[Arantor]

which the new MySQL doesn't have

Yes because it doesn't actually help in practice, and can often make things much worse, as per https://dev.mysql.com/blog-archive/mysql-8-0-retiring-support-for-the-query-cache/

that previously were cached

Considering that the query cache was flushed any time an underlying table was updated, on any busy forum this will be frequent enough that it will underperform (which is why SMF's caching strategy is far preferable)