Relationship between main site and xenforo

[Frank Chino]

Our main site - https://www.bellanca-championclub.com/ - has a xenforo forum attached to it - https://www.bellanca-championclub.com/forum. The site and the xenforo installation currently both reside on HostGator. Because HG's hosting (for some strange reason) won't allow us to upgrade MySQL to a recent version (latest is v 8.0.42.) - it's currently v 5.7.23-23 - I cannot upgrade Joomla to the latest version because of this.

I have my own servers for my other clients with a different host (I was with HG prior to changing to the current one some 8+ years ago and left HG because they were horrible to deal with). I want to move the site (only) over to my server, while leaving the xenforo forum at HG. The reason is that there's another xenforo forum on HG that's tied up with the one mentioned above, and the account is shared.

I am very unfamiliar with xenforo, so I apologise if this is a stupid question, but, is this possible? If so, are there any specific changes I need to make in xenforo for this to happen? Is there any special setup in the domain DNS that I need to be aware of?

Thanks!

 

[Chromaniac]

subdomains you can host on different servers. folders won't would be hard.

 

[chillibear]

Well you could reverse proxy the request for /forum back to the HG hosted board. That should work just fine. You'd need to pop the forum on a different domain (a subdomain would be easiest, eg forum.example.com) and it may take a bit of tweaking to get XF happy - some content rewriting and so forth (of domains) and redirects. I know you can do all of that in Nginx easily enough and I assume Apache has equivalent functionality, but it's been years since we used Apache in anger so I couldn't really say.

Or you could as Chromaniac notes host on different subdomains (eg example.com and forum.example.com) and simply issue a 301 or 302 redirect from /forum to the subdomain. You might have the odd cookie hoop to jump through with the different domains, very much depends on your setup.

Finally it may be worth double checking that Joomla's latest wont work with 5.7. There are changes in v8, but it may well be Joomla are not actually using those features and have simply opted to say v8 is required since 5.7 is EOL. I've seen that noted with quite a few pieces of software. Although it sounds like you have other reasons for moving anyway!

 

[Frank Chino]

Thanks for the replies. Though I've been doing websites for a long time, I've never done sub-domains (mainly cause I've never needed them so never bothered to learn). Neither do I have a clue how to do a reverse proxy. It honestly seems like dealing with a second xenforo account would make it easier, and move both the site and the forum to my server. Assuming migrating xenforo to a new server is easy. THAT I haven't looked into.

And, no, Joomla 5.2.25 does NOT like MySQL 5.***. That old MySQL hasn't played with Joomla since 5.0.2.

 

[Forsaken]

Thanks for the replies. Though I've been doing websites for a long time, I've never done sub-domains (mainly cause I've never needed them so never bothered to learn). Neither do I have a clue how to do a reverse proxy. It honestly seems like dealing with a second xenforo account would make it easier, and move both the site and the forum to my server. Assuming migrating xenforo to a new server is easy. THAT I haven't looked into.

And, no, Joomla 5.2.25 does NOT like MySQL 5.***. That old MySQL hasn't played with Joomla since 5.0.2.

In most cases, migrating XF is just importing a database back up, and transferring files; if you use cPanel or Plesk, it is very simple.

I would personally move away from HostGator, as there is really no benefit to a host that is unwilling to make sure they're up to date (or at least the option is available).

 

[Frank Chino]

That's why I want to move from HG. I left them years ago because they weren't a great host. They've gotten worse!!