A language learners’ forum

Right now, the new forum is running on my personal AWS account. This has two limitations:

• It's hard to figure out what it actually costs to run the forum, because everything shows up on the same bill as my personal sites. (This isn't a huge deal now, but I'd like to have better transparency in case anybody wants to chip in at some point.)
• rdearman currently has full access to the server and the database, but not to the AWS control panel, which offers lots of handy tools for things like managing backups and deploying new services.

So sometime this coming Sunday, I'm going to take the forum offline briefly while I migrate it to a brand-new AWS account that's 100% dedicated to the forum, the Super Challenge bot, and the blog. With luck, I should be able to do the migration in 30 minutes, thanks to the miracle of Docker and cloud services.

We're almost ready to take the site offline and to migrate it to a new, standalone AWS account! This will allow us to know how much the site costs to run each month, and it will mean that site no longer runs off of rdearman's personal server (or my own, like it has been this week).

So sometime in the next few hours, the site will go down for a while so that we can move data, and so that we can make sure that everything works on the new site!

I've made a checklist on GitHub listing the steps, and I'll check them off as the switchover proceeds. I'll link to this in all messages related to the migration, so you'll know when the site is supposed to be back online.

emk wrote:We're almost ready to take the site offline and to migrate it to a new, standalone AWS account! This will allow us to know how much the site costs to run each month, and it will mean that site no longer runs off of rdearman's personal server (or my own, like it has been this week).

So sometime in the next few hours, the site will go down for a while so that we can move data, and so that we can make sure that everything works on the new site!

I've made a checklist on GitHub listing the steps, and I'll check them off as the switchover proceeds. I'll link to this in all messages related to the migration, so you'll know when the site is supposed to be back online.

As others have already said, I'll join my voice to the chorus, "Thank you for all the work you do in keeping us informed!"

And we're back, on the new server! I'll post a thread with details soon.