I posted recently about my experiences in upgrading DotNetNuke 5 to 7, what fun that was! Well I have now had to do the move for real. I expected to follow the same process, but had problems. Turns out the key was to go 5 > 6 > 7. Once I did this the upgrade worked, turns out this is the recommended route. Why my previous trial worked I don’t know?
Anyway I ended up with a local DNN 7 site running against SQL 2012. It still was using DNN 5 based skin (which has problems with IE 10) which I needed to alter, but was functional. So it was time to move my ISP.
Historically I had the site running on Zen Internet, but their Windows hosting is showing its age, they do not offer .NET 4, and appear to have no plans to change this when I last asked. Also there is no means to do a scripted/scheduled backup on their servers.
The lack of .NET 4 meant I could not use Zen for DNN 7. So I choose to move to PowerDNN, which is a DNN specialist, offers the latest Microsoft hosting and was cheaper.
I had expect the migrate/setup to be awkward, but far from it. I uploaded my backups to PowerDNN’s FTP site and the site was live within 10 minutes. I had a good few questions over backup options, virtual directories for other .NET applications etc. all were answered via email virtually instantly. Thus far the service has been excellent, PowerDNN are looking a good choice.