Can someone give me some idea of what the experience is like moving from self hosting to cloud hosting with a big forum (with lots of images/diskspace used etc)

I will of course let customers tell you of their own experiences, but if it helps the process is essentially this

1. Provide a zip of your files and a zip of your database

2. Give us the access details for this (either ftp, or htacess protected link

3. We do the rest

If the amount of files is really huge, reach out. We can always get the majority over prior to your move date, to reduce the amount of time your site is offline.

I did this with a community that had around 3.5M posts and typically 300-500 concurrently active users.

It was a painless process. The team works with you to schedule everything. On the day of the transfer, you turn your site offline (to not lose content), export the database and provide it along with a copy of your website files to IPS. They’ll give you a space to upload it all.

They’ll import everything and set it up on a temporary URL for you to test. Once you’re happy, you’ll change DNS and traffic starts going over to the new location.

Make sure to give IPS any other DNS records needed as well!

What if the current host is awkward about access etc?

We would need to get the data somehow from you. If you contact sales, we can certainly discuss your requirements