Cloud trial migration

[virap]

Hello. I signed up for cloud hosting trial with invision. But how do we move data from an invision self-hosted forum to a the trial cloud setup?

I don't see any conversion/migration tool included in the trial setup. 

Also what would be the ideal approach of backing up self-hosted invison community for restoration on the cloud hosted invision?

Thanks

[Marc]

I have created a ticket for you so we can discuss your requirements. Someone will be in contact as soon as possible

[virap]

Recently the plans changed? Now after the creator pro $149/ month it jumps to business plan $549/ month. That is a huge jump.

It appears to me that Invision is not serious about it's cloud hosting or maybe does not believe in it. A lot of language for the plans are almost religiously mysterious like media. It took me several emails to gain some vague description of what that is, how we measure our current 'media' usage and even now I am not sure the explanation I was given is accurate. Another one is page views and so on. No way to move any real data into the trial invironment. Only they can do it and you have to pay them a fee or pay for the whole year for it to be waived. When you ask a question here, they open an email thread for migration support where customer replies are sometimes overlooked and not replied. The entire point of the dialogue is basically you got to pay us to move the data or pay upfront the whole year. It is kind of hard to pay for awhile year for something we can't try in a real invironment, data.

[Randy Calvert]

You’re not going to get a good answer here. Your best bet is to have that conversation with the sales ticket Marc created for you. The support folks don’t have any say over pricing or package configurations. 

[virap]

33 minutes ago, Randy Calvert said:

You’re not going to get a good answer here. Your best bet is to have that conversation with the sales ticket Marc created for you. The support folks don’t have any say over pricing or package configurations. 

It was more a feedback on my experience with the cloud rather than a question.

[Jordan Miller]

1 hour ago, virap said:

Recently the plans changed? Now after the creator pro $149/ month it jumps to business plan $549/ month. That is a huge jump.

It appears to me that Invision is not serious about it's cloud hosting or maybe does not believe in it.

Hey there! Appreciate you posting in the community for us to publicly weigh in so others who may be searching for something similar can find the answers.

We are serious about our standard plans (where we host).  We are putting a lot of time, attention and resources into them because we feel that will give Invision the best future. That does not = we are forgetting about self-hosted clients by the way. We have a new feature out in June that will include self-hosted – we think you all will like and find it useful.

 

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A lot of language for the plans are almost religiously mysterious like media. It took me several emails to gain some vague description of what that is, how we measure our current 'media' usage and even now I am not sure the explanation I was given is accurate. Another one is page views and so on.

In our correspondence together via email, I clarified what the media and page views metrics consist of. I'd like to share that here for others as well 😊 

"Media would be the total size of files uploaded to your community."

You may need to ask your existing host how much media you have stored. That's not something we can tell you because we don't have access to that (nor can we). 

I also touched on page views:

Regarding page views, we only count dynamic page views from logged in members and from new guests visiting your community. Your page views quota will not be affected if a guest or bot accesses a cached page. Caching is the process of storing copies of your community in a temporary storage location (CDN) so that they can be accessed more quickly. Pages viewed by logged in members are never cached. For example, if 100 members and 50 guests visit a new landing page, that's 101 views."

If you need further explanation, please let me know and I'd be happy to expand on that. 😀 

 

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No way to move any real data into the trial invironment. Only they can do it and you have to pay them a fee or pay for the whole year for it to be waived.

The trial environment is meant to showcase what the community can do, but of course it has its limitations like importing custom items or an entire pre-existing community. 

The Invision team is responsible for the migration from self-hosted (or another platform) to our hosting environment because, for security purposes (among other reasons), we can't give you or any client that kind of protected access. 

 

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When you ask a question here, they open an email thread for migration support where customer replies are sometimes overlooked and not replied. The entire point of the dialogue is basically you got to pay us to move the data or pay upfront the whole year. It is kind of hard to pay for awhile year for something we can't try in a real invironment, data.

Can you please respond to our existing email chain and mention what was overlooked and I will personally check into that for you.

We genuinely want to help create the infrastructure around your community so that it's stable, secure and well-functioning when hosted with us. To move it requires our team to roll up our sleeves and get to work, which yes, does come with a fee associated to it. 

For those wondering, if purchasing a plan monthly, the migration is $250. If purchasing a plan annually, the migration is free of charge. I know $250 is nothing to scoff at; we are trying to keep the fee as low as possible. 

I do agree that we can work on adding more documentation for what specifically our new plans entail. Thank you for offering that. 

Ultimately, we want the transition (should you choose) to move from a self-hosted plan to our standard plans (on Cloud) to be as painless as possible. Sometimes there are growing pains like ones you're possibly experiencing now, but let's work together to find a place where we're all on the same page and can move forward. 

Let me know what you think, and to the rest of the community reading this, if you'd like to respectfully weigh in please feel free. Thank you. 🙏 

[virap]

As I explained previously, those of us in a dedicated hosting environment can't really ask our host to tell us our media usage. Such vague vocabulary and confusion direction were exactly why I decided to post. My host has nothing to do with that nor me or them know your definition of 'media' which is not clearly defined in the pricing or documentation. So that right there is a also good example of overlooking thing in conversations with the clients as well as failing to reply, receive emails etc.

[Jordan Miller]

19 minutes ago, virap said:

As I explained previously, those of us in a dedicated hosting environment can't really ask our host to tell us our media usage. Such vague vocabulary and confusion direction were exactly why I decided to post. My host has nothing to do with that nor me or them know your definition of 'media' which is not clearly defined in the pricing or documentation. So that right there is a also good example of overlooking thing in conversations with the clients as well as failing to reply, receive emails etc.

Oh interesting. From my own personal experience, as well as talking to other self-hosted clients, I haven't run into any issue asking a host where to help look/locate the total volume of media storage. I'd suggest trying to ask your host and seeing what their response is - who knows, you may be pleasantly surprised that they can indeed help you quantifying / finding it!

So basically, when you or a member uploads a file (a jpg / png / gif photo for example), it's called media. Other media includes video or audio files. This media is then stored somewhere in your self-hosted environment.

So if you uploaded 100 jpg photos, and each photo is 1 MB, then your media storage would be 100 MB total. 😃 

You can apply this same principal to other types of media. 

I hope I shed some light on things for you! 

[Randy Calvert]

Media size…. Looking at your uploads folder to get a good idea about how much space is being used.  While it may not be 100% of everything, it should get you to about 85-90% of where you need to be.  (There might be some uploads related to commerce, or theme resources, etc that might be somewhere else.  But in general those don’t take up a bunch of space.  Things like avatars, user uploaded images, etc are going to be the lion share of media usage.)

[Jordan Miller]

19 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

Media size…. Looking at your uploads folder to get a good idea about how much space is being used.  While it may not be 100% of everything, it should get you to about 85-90% of where you need to be.  (There might be some uploads related to commerce, or theme resources, etc that might be somewhere else.  But in general those don’t take up a bunch of space.  Things like avatars, user uploaded images, etc are going to be the lion share of media usage.)

Appreciate you weighing in with that! Thanks 😊 

[David N.]

On 5/10/2022 at 8:20 PM, virap said:

A lot of language for the plans are almost religiously mysterious like media. It took me several emails to gain some vague description of what that is, how we measure our current 'media' usage and even now I am not sure the explanation I was given is accurate

The way I understand it, "media" is another word for "disk usage", meaning the amount of disk space you're going to take on the servers. Most hosts have a maximum disk space you can use and if you go over you have to upgrade to the next plan. 

On 5/10/2022 at 8:20 PM, virap said:

Another one is page views and so on.

Page views are the number of times someone sees a page. That's a metric in your Google Analytics so you can measure it from there.