[deanhills]

The shared hosting seems to really limit the type of solutions you can try to fix this problem... I wonder how your provider would feel about doing the configs for you, or granting you a temporary shell acct so you can do them yourself.

I wonder, how stuck are you on phpbb?  myBB, for instance, has a merge system which allegedly transforms your phpbb3.0 into mybb1.8

@fitkoh All of the work I did for the last discussions has been with my post4vps.com VPS.  

So yesterday I thought to do things differently by focusing on a lower php version.  I.e. the version that the original forum was created in 5.4.

So I thought to focus on hosting where I would be able to get php Version 5.4 without a major upheaval.  I have a shared hosting account at Limitless Hosting with genuine cpanel.  It has a php version change tool in the panel, so I was able to change the php version from 7.2 to 5.4 very easily.  I had a WordPress site on Version 7.2 but so far seems to be OK with the lowering of the version.  I'll check in more detail after I've completed my phpBB project first.

First I did was to change the name servers of the domain at Namecheap to the shared host's name servers.  That usually propagates fast, but yesterday was a little slower.  I then used the Add on Domain tool to add the domain in my shared host's cpanel.  I then created a database and imported the database I had backed up previously, just with the first line of the sql database referring to pass and password deleted.  The import was 100% successful. Following this I updated my backed up config.php with the new database details. I did this in NotePad ++ but I could have done it in cPanel's File Manager too.  Next I zipped up my December 2019 backup files (as part of making the backups I also copied all of the folders from the previous cpanel hosting File Manager).  I then uploaded the zipped package with my cpanel File Manager - very easy - like seconds.  Then extracted the files.  All of the above must have taken about 5 minutes or a little more.  Like super fast as the hosting is very fast. Uploading files with my VPS with FileZilla sftp was super slow in comparison.

The DNS didn't propagate immediately, but within a few hours I was able to get the Forum up perfectly.  Not a single thing out of place.

So bottom line.  In the life of phpBB Forum the php version is important.  And can literally mean life or death when one moves a Forum to a new host.

Now my next project will be to see whether I can upgrade the Forum to the current phpBB version.  There are two methods.  The Install or Automatic Update.

Think I'll make a thorough backup of everything first.  Then try the automatic update first.

Once I've been able to master the above or should I rather say "if" I'm able to do it, next step will be to see whether I can upgrade the php version.  One thing I love about my shared host's cpanel is that it has a php changer.  So I'd like to see what happens when I change the php version back to 7.2.