Should I change my current Hosting requirements or even a change of host?

Jon12345 said:
I'm slowly but surely coming around to your way of thinking. I've always had a managed VPS service in the past, but I am paying about $300 per year for the privilege with it built into part of my hosting fee
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You have to ask yourself if you want to grow your forum like a business and focus on xenForo alone, pay $650/year and are done with all of the hosting stuff (by using xenForo cloud). You will never outgrow the starter edition and if you would ever, your income would far exceed whatever the cloud would cost you.

If you love computers and want to know more about how servers work, getting a VPN / your own server is a great experience. However it does not translate into growing your business. It translates into cutting costs in the future.

As for VPNs: they can be difficult to setup. As for Servers: Why not get one for $40 USD for one month without any more setup cost and go from there. Servers are dirt cheap and you have no additional cost whereas usually the VPN/Cloud model is designed to sell you additional stuff.

It took me a long time to know about Linux. And yes, you cut costs in an extreme way the more you know about that.

But if I think about it for my situation, it would be much more useful for my community if my focus would be on that community 100% and get away with all the technical stuff. If you live in a first world country the xenForo subscription is like twice a netflix premium with the opportunity to make money. If you live in the jungle like me, the monthly xenForo subscription could be like the rent of your house. Whatever.
 
Forsaken said:
If you do end up using Plesk, you really won't need to do much yourself outside of GUI; if you do need to do anything, you can likely just hire someone for one time help.
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I am now steering towards DirectAdmin. I prefer the look of Plesk, but DirectAdmin is less expensive. Any of these options are way cheaper than CPanel though, so I will be glad to get rid.
 
Marcus said:
You have to ask yourself if you want to grow your forum like a business and focus on xenForo alone, pay $650/year and are done with all of the hosting stuff (by using xenForo cloud). You will never outgrow the starter edition and if you would ever, your income would far exceed whatever the cloud would cost you.

If you love computers and want to know more about how servers work, getting a VPN / your own server is a great experience. However it does not translate into growing your business. It translates into cutting costs in the future.

As for VPNs: they can be difficult to setup. As for Servers: Why not get one for $40 USD for one month without any more setup cost and go from there. Servers are dirt cheap and you have no additional cost whereas usually the VPN/Cloud model is designed to sell you additional stuff.

It took me a long time to know about Linux. And yes, you cut costs in an extreme way the more you know about that.

But if I think about it for my situation, it would be much more useful for my community if my focus would be on that community 100% and get away with all the technical stuff. If you live in a first world country the xenForo subscription is like twice a netflix premium with the opportunity to make money. If you live in the jungle like me, the monthly xenForo subscription could be like the rent of your house. Whatever.
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For me, it is about cost cutting. I'm going to try the Hetzner route, and that means I have to go for a cloud option because they are the only ones with data centers in the US.

Also, I like the idea of getting a bit more clued up on the techie sideof things regarding server admin. I was watching some videos about email mx records, zones etc last night. Made a lot more sense after I watched that 12 minute video, so I'm making some progress.
 
⭐ Alex ⭐ said:
Most of the guests are going to be bots, web crawlers. The point I'm trying to make is, you have a very low human count so it's not worth paying such a high price. Since you have 5 other sites you may want to opt for like a $20/month vps with some extra specs and put them all on one server.

Or use small cloud instances and have them all separate but one shared managed database server, that would be best for security so that an attack on one doesnt take down all 5 unless the attack does take down the database.
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I've just realised that you have probably gone to the link in my profile to see how busy my forum was. But that is not my main forum, which was started 24 years ago.

One thing I've always noticed is that I'm probably not using much CPU on my site since everything is cached so much. Here are some stats:

1713889759826.webp

From this, I am a bit confused. On the one hand, it seems to suggest I'm using such a small percentage of the CPU, from the CPU Usage chart. But on the CPU Load Averages, it seems more heavily used. Am I viewing this wrong?

Or use small cloud instances and have them all separate but one shared managed database server, that would be best for security so that an attack on one doesnt take down all 5 unless the attack does take down the database.
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I have one main site which I could put on its own dedicated Hetzner Cloud VPS server, and put my other low traffic sites all bunched into a shared 1 vCPU Hetzner Cloud VPS Server. So yes, good idea.
 
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Jon12345 said:
From this, I am a bit confused. On the one hand, it seems to suggest I'm using such a small percentage of the CPU, from the CPU Usage chart. But on the CPU Load Averages, it seems more heavily used. Am I viewing this wrong?
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It depends how many cores you have. In load average, each core has value of 1. By that I mean, if you have 1 core, and load average shows 1, it means your server load is about 100%. If you have 10 cores, and load average is 1, server load is about 10%.

So, how many cores you have defines how to read load average.
 
Alan_SP said:
It depends how many cores you have. In load average, each core has value of 1. By that I mean, if you have 1 core, and load average shows 1, it means your server load is about 100%. If you have 10 cores, and load average is 1, server load is about 10%.

So, how many cores you have defines how to read load average.
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My spec is:
  • 4 CPU (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v4 @ 2.40GHz)
Now the 4 CPU thing...I don't know if that is referring to cores or if they are full CPU's.
 
It doesn't look like you're using cloudflare in any tests, have you tried it? It can cache about 50% of your bandwidth. 40-70 on average for me.
 
I see... I've not heard of bunnycdn but cloudflare offers plenty to play with on their free tier.
 
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For hosting though, Namecheap has the Magnetar plan for $25/month.. offering:

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  • 8 CPU cores
  • 12 GB RAM
  • 240 GB SSD RAID 10
  • 6000 GB bandwidth
It looks like 12 GB would do you good, since you're getting pretty close to the 8GB limit on your current host.
 
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Jon12345 said:
From this, I am a bit confused. On the one hand, it seems to suggest I'm using such a small percentage of the CPU, from the CPU Usage chart. But on the CPU Load Averages, it seems more heavily used. Am I viewing this wrong?
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It's showing an average of 0.5% cpu usage. You should offload your attachments to cloudflare R2 using Digitalpoint's addon and see how much disk space that will free up.

That way you'll be able to downgrade your plan in your current host.

Is your database also stored on that VPS or is it separate?
 
Just tossing my 2 Cents. You can run a xenforo forum (fairly active) on shared hosting without hitting limits I’ve done it.

Now that shared hosting I had was slower but at 24 a year I am not complaining.

I however wanted something better so I have 1 KnownHost account hosting a Wordpress blog that is fast. $120 a year

I also have another Wordpress hosting account with Ethernetservers. About $68 a year.

I would choose either one but for a price point is Ethernetserver. Would get my business.
 
I'm going to get a CPX11 cloud server from Hetzner in the US data center, so I can spin it up and practice transferring another one of my sites across to it. It's only like $6pm for 2 vCPU 2gb ram on shared hosting. Then, once I get the hang of it, I can reconfigure it to a Dedicated CPU in the cloud.

I suppose I will need to decide what operating system to use, which is perhaps compatible with DirectAdmin. I am assuming that DA is available for Hetzners cloud computing. All a learning curve for me. Not sure which OS to use yet.
 
Jon12345 said:
My spec is:
  • 4 CPU (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v4 @ 2.40GHz)
Now the 4 CPU thing...I don't know if that is referring to cores or if they are full CPU's.
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It's dedicated server?

It might mean than that you have 4 CPUs with 8 cores each, so 1 in server load average would mean it's CPU load of 3% (1/32).

It does seem you have overkill of server.
 
Alan_SP said:
It's dedicated server?

It might mean than that you have 4 CPUs with 8 cores each, so 1 in server load average would mean it's CPU load of 3% (1/32).

It does seem you have overkill of server.
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It is one of KnownHost's managed VPS offerings.
 
It has been a steep learning curve, this server admin thing. But so far, I have created a cloud server with Hetzner, installed DirectAdmin and now I am looking at installing LEMP.

DirectAdmin's control panel says I am already being subjected to brute force attacks. Looks like I will have to learn some server hardening.
 
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