Completely New to This

[deeps]

Hi All,
I have been posting on my association's. phpBB forum for years now. Since going on to the committee I have been looking closely at our website and forum. I now realise that our forum is a stand alone app, and the button on the web front page is a link to it. I understand that in the event we change our website and provider, that our forum could be safely hosted with a provider of our choice without risk to the forum or its contents.

Do I understand this correctly please?

The reason for posting is that the current host has been charging us an astronomic price for what is a small website, mainly populated with pictures, pdfs and links. I can see nothing complex hence my concern at the huge price. So, it is my intention to move the site and forum to a more economical hosting solution, with a view to a complete re-vamp of the website BUT wanting to keep our phpBB (V3.3.11 at the moment) intact.

Question: How difficult is it for someone who is reasonably au fait with things to update a phpBB version please? I understand the need for backing up before changing the version and ensuring the data is kept safe. I just wonder how difficult it is to do.

Please advise and thank you for your patience.

Kind regards
Steve

[janus_zonstraal]

If you follow this it is normally not to difficult, and if you run into problems you can call for help here.
https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... or-domain/
You can also ask somebody to do it for you.

[warmweer]

Question: How difficult is it for someone who is reasonably au fait with things to update a phpBB version please? I understand the need for backing up before changing the version and ensuring the data is kept safe. I just wonder how difficult it is to do.

Updating a phpBB forum is a piece of cake: see https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... radeguide/
In your case it's a simple update within the 3.3 series : https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... ide/minor/

As to Backups: see https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... tructions/

The only time you need to take care when upgrading/updating is when you have extensions or extra styles, in which case you may have to perform extra actions such as updating the styles/extensions or completely uninstalling them (e.g. when there is no update for that extension or style to the latest phpBB version).

[deeps]

That is brilliant. Many thanks.

[thecoalman]

phpBB is actually a pretty complex application but that is not what you get charged for hosting by itself. CPU, bandwidth and storage are the real limitations. Storage and bandwidth is typically not an issue with most phpBB forums unless it's heavily laden with images or a lot of video. The CPU activity is going to depend on lot of things but the amount of people utilizing it is the main factor. There is no magic number for this but the cheapest hosting plan should be able to handle 50+ average users "online" which comes out to a page load every few seconds, note that bots can cause a tremendous amount of traffic so you usually need to manage them to keep activity low.

The dollar number is not the only thing that is important. Dirt cheap hosting is useless if their support is useless.