Moving a Forum

[MrILoveTheAnts]

I was wondering about this forum, how much it costs to maintain, and all that.
I'm also on an Ant Forum from another provider and I feel it's to expensive for what it is. We've been meaning to move for a while now but the Mod keeps shouting "but we'll lose all the old posts." Honestly I don't think they're all worth keeping. I have no idea how but apparently there are ways to auto transfer this post information to a new forum. 
How is this board created. I've gone on other forums and it seems like people can just magically make them without the help of a higher corporation like forum provider.

[reinbeau]

I have the power to create, move, delete, etc. forums on another board I moderate, but I don't do it.  As far as moving to a new provider, I'd rather have someone who really knew what they were doing do it, however, it can be as easy as just backing up the forum and moving it - it's a database, a rather complex one, but moving it is definitely doable.

[Robo]

There are many open source (free) forum packages out there, this one included.   The cost comes from the hosting provider and your bandwidth requirements.

You can easily move a forum from one provider to another without loosing any posts, especially if you stick with the same forum package.

Last November, Beemaster switched from phpBB forums to the current SMF forums and migrated 20,000 posts and even personal messages. Most of the work was done in the background,  except the final migration which took the site down for less than one hour.  This was to make sure we didn't have anybody posting on the old forums while we were moving everything to the new forums.

There are plenty of very reasonable hosting providers out there. Cost will be relative to the bandwidth you use.

[MrILoveTheAnts]

Well I'm glad to hear this seems to be a simple thing. We're using ezboard and I'm not quite sure what type of thing they use. Ezboard kind of went under as a company, everyone tells us their expensive, Ads get annoying on there unless you're a "gold community."
To be honest I'd like it if it were similar to this place.

Could anyone recommend a free program for this? Will is just copy and past the posts over to another URL or Web Address? Or does it actually take the data and try to translate it into something else? We are very worried about losing years and years of posts.

[Robo]

Well,  things would be relatively easy "if" you had access to the database.   From what I can tell, ezboard does not give you access to the data. They sort of "lock you in for life" when you start using it.  The same thing goes for a lot of these blogging facilities like blogspot.  You spend all the time to input content and you can't get the database to move so you are forced to stay with them.

It appears you aren't completely stuck though, it may be just a little bit more difficult journey.  I do see there is an app out on sourceforge that spiders thru your ezboard and creates a phpBB replica.   I would then convert from phpBB to SMF (same as this board) as I am now partial to SMF after running both.   You will need to get some hosting before you can start.  I would check with zunibee to see what he has to offer or I have used ICDsoft and would recommend them too.  However, anytime you have to do a conversion, especially by reading html pages in this case, your surely in for some syntax headaches along the way.

It is a painful lesson to learn,   but it is always good to think about "the what ifs" when starting to use a so-called free service and who will ultimately own (control) the data.

Your best option might be to cut your losses now and make a fresh start with something you control and make the current forum read-only as a reference.

[Understudy]

I was wondering about this forum, how much it costs to maintain, and all that.
I'm also on an Ant Forum from another provider and I feel it's to expensive for what it is. We've been meaning to move for a while now but the Mod keeps shouting "but we'll lose all the old posts." Honestly I don't think they're all worth keeping. I have no idea how but apparently there are ways to auto transfer this post information to a new forum. 
How is this board created. I've gone on other forums and it seems like people can just magically make them without the help of a higher corporation like forum provider.

Forum related expenses.
Domain name
DNS (can be brought to none with free DNS service)
Bandwidth  (a biggie, if you run the server from home, your costs will be lower but you may not have enough bandwidth and you may violate your terms of service).
Hosting/Server Costs vary your own server at home may be cheap however it may not have server specifications. Co hosting and dedicated servers have their own costs. Simple hosting is avaliable for less but your disk space is limited.
Backup depending on hosting and diskspace this can be a small expense or a large one.

Forum non related expenses
Stress from dealing with downtime, trolls, and spammers.
Loss of time with family.
Staff volunteers can be like Staph infections.

Sincerely,
Brendhan