Will give it a +1 but sounds like they're onto it.

Still 120ms+ as opposed to <10ms

@julian I'm in NZ, Digital Ocean too geographically far away for me sozz

A small private club/bunch of mates that split off from a larger forum, ~200 members, 150k posts, ~20 people online during the day type thing, mostly post a lot of crap. IP.Board was a bit fat for what we required (NodeBB fits much better), but in 2009 it was the best option.

I'll restore the database/app to a fresh VM and give you access if that's the easiest?

Boom. Will do.

Have had a search and couldn't locate it (but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist somewhere) and I'm really interested in converting a private IP.Board community to NodeBB, asap. I'd even be interested in paying someone to write the converter and then opensource it?

I've been hosting a relatively large vBulletin forum for 10 years (2M+ posts), and a smaller IP.Board forum for the past 4. I spun up a test VM and got NodeBB up and running in about 5 minutes, and I can't stress enough how refreshing this is...

Quite a few more features would be required before I would look at converting away from vBulletin, but it's getting pretty close.