The mycelium that makes up our global community has been steadily branching out and spreading, absorbing all the nutrients it can find along the way, and using its resources to thrive. This network of hyphae, you, our members, are what makes this community strong, are what gives this community its culture, its vibe, its soul. So thank you for being a part of the network, the family. Thank you for making this community a part of your lives. Thank you for sharing your experiences and your knowledge so that others may learn and grow. Thank you.
It's time to make another metamorphosis of spirit, of knowledge; it's time to do our part to cleanse ourselves and our environment; it's time to use our mycelial network to mycofilter the toxins and baggage of our past.
Yes, it's time to move forward into our new bodies. (server) It's time to grow my friends. It's time to grow...
WTF JUST HAPPENED!?
So this is a pretty good story.
We have been on the same host network for over 10-years and while nothing is perfect it was at the very least stable. Support was good. All-in-all no complaints, that's why we stayed. Fast forward, that company grows substantially and ultimately sells to a UK based provider. There were several months of calm. Nothing. Then like the flip of a switch the new owners are in full control -- all the old sites go away, the old portals, and everything is now rebranded with totally different software running everything. Fine.
However, there have been several instances of downtime, outages, poor support, and generally _zero_ leeway with anything. Very black and white. Very by the book. Not to mention it's expensive compared to what's available today. Unf, it's time to move.
The Plan... yes, the plan. Well... Plans.
So the intention was that we would build the new environment, test everything, get it all squared up then move the site over. From your perspective it would have been nice and clean. HA! So what really happened was that the server suffered a bit of a catastrophic and cascaded set of failures. RIGHT. BEFORE. WE. MOVED. Timing is not on our side. So instead of a smooth hardly noticeable blip, it was a 4-day slog to figure out _what_ was wrong and learn how to fix it. Over and over, it was this, or that, and we busted down roadblock after roadblock.
In the end, here we are. It's been a journey. We made it! Our new home!
WAIT, EVERYTHING LOOKS THE SAME
Yea, I thought so too. 
So the initial plan was to move us 1:1. Then start preparing for the upgrade that's been a long time coming. So this is our 1:1. What we need now is for each and every one of you to scour this site and report anything that doesn't work. We need to weed through all of this before we attempt any kind of update, especially one as major as this.
I'll be going through all the add-ons and modifications we've made over the years. We'll need to seek updates and compatible versions or decommission the app/add-on. In some cases there may be a replacement with like functionality, but some times not. We'll work through this and make sure we get as close to the same functionality we have today -- we will also try to improve any system/app/add-on that we can along the way.
There are also plans in the works to remove any and all paid features. This community, and the collective knowledge contained within, should be available to everyone -- so we'll be working to make all features available to all members, including chat. More news on this to come.
FEEDING THE NERDS
The TL;DR version of this is that with our current setup we should never have to fear hardware or disk space constraints again...
In the old world we were still using physical hardware. If you're out of space you need to move to another server. If you need more CPU or RAM, you need to move to another server. Physical moves are tough... There are always complications. ALWAYS. Take this move, for example. 
In this new cloud forward world, updates are merely button presses. In the time it takes to reboot the server you can double your disk space, or add 8 CPUs and 32GB of RAM.
In this new cloud forward world, updates are merely button presses. In the time it takes to reboot the server you can double your disk space, or add 8 CPUs and 32GB of RAM. So this move. Aside from the server conditions that forced our hand, the move itself generated quite the stink. Some of the applications we were using were ZEND Encoded and apparently that works against specific software versions. The version we were running, for example, was an ID 5, but the oldest software I could find/install to match what we had gave an ID 7. So it would fail and PHP would crash. The only way to resolve this was to downgrade, which we couldn't do, or obtain encoded versions that are compatible with the version we're running. I suppose the 3rd option would be to just remove the encoded software, which is what we ended up having to do after much trial and error, and about 4 virtual servers worth of testing and tweaking.
Another point of contention was that the old server didn't have enough collective space to do an upgrade in place as we would need double the resources we're using. So just moving the data from the old server to the new server took several hours (>200GB).
In the end we made it. Play around. Test out the new digs. Feedback welcome. Please post any feedback in this thread and we'll work on getting things sorted over the next week or so. 
Welcome friends...
SOME QUESTIONS TO ASK
- What's working well?
- What's not working well?
- What needs changed?
