Community infrastructure studio · Since 2001
We keep large online communities running.
Rescue, migration and long-term care for forums and online communities. The archive, the URLs, the members, and the machinery underneath.
Something difficult landed on your desk?
Something broke.
The board is down, the database is throwing errors, an upgrade went badly, or nobody left understands what the last administrator built.
Something has to move.
A forum, server or community has outgrown its home — or its software is a decade past support. Moving it without losing posts, members, attachments or URLs is the difficult part.
Something needs looking after.
It works. You would like it to still be working in ten years.
Comfortable with the unfashionable stuff.
Production systems rarely look like the diagrams in a cloud-provider brochure.
We work with infrastructure accumulated over years: forum and community platforms, Linux servers, PHP applications, WordPress installations, databases, search, mail, reverse proxies, Cloudflare, DNS, backups, custom code and the awkward dependencies connecting them.
Sometimes the right answer is modernization.
Sometimes the right answer is understanding what already works and not breaking it.
Sometimes rebuilding is the answer. More often the system needs to be kept secure and current instead: patched, backed up, running on versions that still receive fixes, and watched by somebody who would notice if that stopped being true.
Selected work
All work-
Care · Migration
WindowCleaner.com
sixteen years, since 2010. Their forums carried from vBulletin 3 all the way to Discourse, and a Magento store that became a Shopify one.
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Care
PracticalMachinist.com
More than ten years looking after one of the larger metalworking and manufacturing communities online.
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Care
GT40s.com
sixteen years, since 2010, and never once recovered, because it has been maintained without interruption the whole time.
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Rescue
WhiteBlaze and HammockForums
A root-level compromise destroyed the databases and left the drive apparently empty. We rebuilt both communities from forensic images and raw data carving.
Your client has a problem you don't want.
We work with agencies, developers and service providers that occasionally inherit infrastructure or legacy systems outside their normal scope. Bring us in for the difficult part and keep the client relationship.
We've been doing this since websites were considerably less complicated.
We started building websites in 1996. MagnetiCat itself dates from 2001, and grew out of running our own web communities into development, Linux administration, migrations and long-term infrastructure work for clients.
The systems we work on now are mostly ones that grew rather than got designed: changed hands several times, outlived the people who built them, and still carry a community that would notice immediately if they stopped.
Have something difficult?
Tell us what you are dealing with. You do not need to know exactly what is wrong before contacting us.