Possibly going from 3.6.8 to 5 Cloud

[psychrev]

Hello,

I am a moderator on a forum that has been active since about 2000. It was much busier at one point, but now we only have about 50 users. The owner of the forums currently hosts the server himself, and we are using VBulletin 3.6.8. Recently, a long time problem user was banned under a new account and decided to start DOSing our server. Unfortunately, the owner is not savvy enough to do anything but block his IP, which is a proxy. He then gets another proxy, and continues his attack a few hours/days later.

The owner has agreed to let us explore options about how to deal with this. He is not able or willing to do much on his end, however. But I am considering presenting him the option of using you Cloud service to take care of everything. Otherwise we will have to find someone to set up everything for us, since none of us know what we are doing in that regard, and just updating the software won't fix his attacks. I'm pretty sure they are not very sophisticated, for what it's worth. We found some postings of his online trying to come up with ways to hack the actual forum but it seems like he wasn't able to do this.

Ok, so I have a few questions:

1. If we use Cloud will we also need to purchase the new license, or is that included in the subscription price?

2. We have archives going back all the way to the beginning. Will we be able to keep all that data accessible to users like it currently is?

3. What kind of downtime would we experience during this process?

Thanks for your help

[Wayne Luke]

1) You only need to purchase the Cloud package.

2) Your old data can be migrated. The site will be upgraded during the migration.

3) Really depends on the size of your site. A minimum of a few hours. Depending on the processes to get a database backup and upgrade it, it could be several days. Your existing site would remain, just in an Off state so you can relay messages to your users as needed.