Question about merging during a host switch

[MzStevens]

Hi please forgive me if this has been answered but I wasn't quite sure what search terms to use to find it. 

I just moved my SMF forums to a new host (it was self hosted, now I'm hosting at Arvixe).  I couldn't get the forums to come back up and was getting the white screen of death, which the SMF wiki says is usually due to budget hosting and hot having enough memory to run it.  

I was planning on switching over to MyBB anyways, because I'm not very happy with SMF, so I wondered if I would be able to perform the merge even if my current forums aren't working.  I just wanted to check and see if that would maybe fix my problem before I went and shelled out the extra money for better hosting.

Any feedback or thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated!

[avril]

Just make a backup of everything you have there, then you can simply try yourself if it will work or not.
If for some reason it will not work, you can try to do this on your own computer using xampp for example, then transfer allready converted stuff to live server.

At the end, whatever you could do, nothing bad may happen if you have backup of your data.

[MzStevens]

Thanks! I do have backups and I'm not sure why I didn't think to try a local install first.

[Jones H]

In general a white screen indicates some sort of php error (which may be caused by a memory issue but can also be caused by something like a missing package). As the merge system only works with the database (and the attachment files) it should still work.