I’m at the end of my tether here, folks.
Long story made short: my fiancee’s forum was owned and operated by the husband of one of the members. They are now getting divorced, and he no longer wants to maintain the site or the hosting. Somehow, the transfer of this site has fallen upon me, and I really have no idea what I’m doing.
I could start a new message board from scratch for all of these women, but they want to maintain their database of old discussions, and therein lies the issue. I have not a single clue on how to get this already established forum up and running on the new host, let alone how to take the data dump from the old host and plop it into the new one. For the last two days, the website has displayed various error screens as I haphazardly tinker with the files and settings, and I’m afraid I’ve broken it more than fixed it at this point.
So, please, please help, if you can. I need a complete dummy-fied explanation of what I need to do to take the old Vanilla forum and move it to its new home on DreamHost. I have all of the forum’s files and the .sql database sitting on my desktop, and I’m more than willing to delete everything in the ftp and start with a clean slate. I just need a lot of guidance.
Can anyone give me their best attempt at a step-by-step here, because everything I’ve found online thus far is way beyond my limited expertise and understanding.