Platform swap

[Roger2]

Hi

I have a long-time working system installed using the GoDaddy cPanel and updated to later versions periodically by me from within the admin section on the actual forum (2.0.19 was briefly installed but with smiley issues I backed to 2.0.18).

This forum has now almost no traffic, and I'm wondering how difficult or sensible it would be to install SMF on a spare PC or NAS, import the data to it (we're talking a tar.gz backup of the whole of 500MB), and allow occasional connects to it for reference using my IP address?

Any pointers - or a stern warning not to do it - appreciated.

An alternative, which I know I could do but seems extremely inefficient - would be to spider the lot to a humungous number of web pages.

Appreciate your thoughts.

Roger

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

You can get SMF up and running with just about any spare PC you got laying around, and it's surprisingly easy.

Even if you haven't done anything like that before, it just takes a bit of google-fu to install Debian, Apache, PHP and MariaDB, and you could even fairly easily point your existing domain to your home device with Cloudflare and some clever scripting.

BUT - Actually making that all safe and secure, and keeping things up to date without breaking anything, may be a different matter all together. If you intend for the install to be public, I would generally advice against it. Paying a small fee for a shared host is easier and generally safer.

[Roger2]

Thanks for that, Aleksi.  I think I did something similar to that some years ago - might have been for phpbb. My problem than was I could not for love nor money get it to recognise the database.

In fact it would only be made public in short bursts. But I guess it only takes a short burst for the determined pondlife.