Yeppers, I say not to go with vbulletin, I have had first hand admin experience with it some 10 years ago, vbulletin 4 was just unfinished, bloated and poor vs vb 3.8 in my experience at that time, and having read a lot, it seems that has not changed with Vb5.

Xenforo has come a long way, not sure if IPB is still a thing, But with any forum, just need to put up some security up, a firewall and then serve the site through a CDN like cloudflare. But if not Xenforo then pick another forum software, just not vBulletin.

Yep cpanel to cpanel is no big deal, even any host will do that, but its getting the forum transfered to new software and keeping things intact and all, thats the hard part. Although there is not much you want to change in the forum, else you may lose some existing members, on the upside you may gain new ones. There needs to be a balance in the design too. Hiring someone would be the best, and how I would do it.

I checked happytogather a while ago, I think it was a linkage of sites you ran? You could try Hawk Host, I have exprience with them in the past and they offer the best service I have received. Webhosting talk forums will have some more info. But agreed, they are all good till something goes wrong.

Now, as for the Legacy, well thats a day bound to come, hopefully not anytime soon, but it will. Goes for you, me and everyone reading this. You could setup something so that in such a event the details of the cpanel/ftp/forum are given or transferred to some trusted folks. You must have some old moderator folks if they are up for taking the responsibility.

I might had spoken too soon myself, as I will be moving back towards Germany later this year so things get busy but with my resourced I would had taken over if you wanted to. Thing is though I believe you still have a lot left in you still ;) I know that you dont want to turn this place into a cheap advertising wall, which some folks do when they take over. So lets do that, and move hosts to something that works. And one day when you do get tired or feel like you could use a hand or what not, You can count on me or some of us to. If you ever feel like dropping me a line or a call, you can find my details here :smile:

I did a quick check.
I currently use 55g of diskspace. Not sure if that includes the database)
100-150g bandwidth/monthly

Managed dedicated server running 8 processors.

a modern semi dedicated would go for starters, with the low volume traffic we see now a days, dont think we need 8 cpu's either. depends on the age of the hardware too.

I'm figuring a VPS would work. I can't tell how much RAM I have.

Try this for some historic data, you have cpanel there right?
https://forums.cpanel.net/resources/...x-servers.379/

I would say lets start with something like a semi dedicated as here https://www.hawkhost.com/semi-dedicated-hosting or we can even try professional shared (yuk I know) to see how much we actually use realistically, we dont see a thousand members all active on the board at the same time. I am happy to chip in half if you want to cover the other half.

I don't like hosts that claim unlimited. I'm fearful that they oversell. I do think I need to migrate to a new forum though. It's only a matter of time until this version of vBulletin gets hacked.

Well, I have used those guys before and can vouch, their service is top notch. But that said there are others too, might be worth while to start looking and settle on one, then move the site, and finally start picking the forum software to use, the longer you stay here on this host the more the costs rack up.

Here is also a great one,
https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server

I've had offers. I forgot what I was offered at the time. One figure wasn't bad for a small niche forum. But it wasn't anything to write home about either.

And what did they want to do with it? Well, I would say to keep the spirit of the forum this has grown to be, it has to be left the way its found, slightly improved but for the most part, relaxed and left to the public to discuss these cars. Not turned into a cheap advertising / marketing tool for some joint corp. I guess profit is not the reason you created this either so selling for some little money and all may not be as rewarding as passing it down as a legacy to the right person(s) when the time is right.

I created this site because when the ti was new people would create their own personal ti website. Sell the car and delete. Valuable information was gone. It was never about the money.

Was hoping to install Xenforo here. Too much is out of date.

Requirements not met
The following XenForo requirements were not met. Please contact your host for help.

PHP 5.6.0 or newer is required. 5.4.45 does not meet this requirement. Please ask your host to upgrade PHP.
The required PHP extension Iconv could not be found. Please ask your host to install this extension.
XenForo also requires MySQL 5.5 or newer. Please manually check that you meet this requirement.

I know where you are coming from Steven. Thats why I said dont just go and delete it, this site maybe 15 years old but that doesn't mean anything, the Ti is becoming more and more of a niche. Look 5 years ago I would never consider a Ti or a 4 cylinder. I am glad I bought it, and although mine went kaput in a speed bump, I plan to buy a 318ti again when I am in Germany! See, now would I without this forum? Would I care about making supercharger kits for the 318ti? without this community? I know my work will have users here, people will see it, they will like it.

We are using the latest PHP 7.2. Now dont try to install Xenforo yourself and do the whole conversion, I say we hire someone to do it. Cut it in half. we can have the forum members pay us some as well. Although you could likely change the ph version yourself from cpanel too, I would suggest not to, it could break things.

PS: Whats your number, if you drop me a message with it I will give you a ring later and we can talk over the phone if you like. I tried calling the BMW CCA but they put me on a machine.

I love this site. I go to it weekly. I have been a supporter. I am willing to help. TI's FTW!

I need to wait until Sept for some free time. I've migrated to a few times. I was a very early adopter of Xenforo.

Does anyone know the admins contact? I'm fairly new here, but I have a server and I'm willing to cover the costs of moving it over and taking over. I would also delegate a couple people to be moderators etc. If the admin reads this, can you please pm me? I'd like to keep this running.

In all the years there hasn't been a need for moderators. :)
I'm going move the forum over to another forum package and look for another host. The articles section may not be easy to port over.