I recently got to take on the task of migrating a social networking website from an aging system & platform to a
new cloud-hosted platform. The old system consisted of Windows 2000 Server, ColdFusion 5, MSSQL 2000, and IIS 5.
The new platform is running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Linux, MySQL 5.5, Railo 3, and Apache 2.2.

The first catch was that all of this had to be done with only FTP access to the source tree.
The second catch was that the site was still running ColdFusion 5, from 2001 – which meant a lot of missing features.
No SSH, Remote Desktop, no SQL Server Management Studio, no ColdFusion admin access, etc. Just FTP.
I was also in a hurry to get it done, as it was all being done on a volunteer basis, and I was moving out of
my house in a couple of weeks …
This post serves to document the process a bit for future developers and technically inclined users of the site
that might be curious about what was involved.