A question on hosting a small forum for friends

[John1744]

I have been running a small forum for about twenty years for a group of internet friends who have all known each other since 2004. We have about fifty users, and ran vBulletin until about say 2019 or so when we switched to Xenforo. I was paying about $120 in hosting for a small VPS every 60 or 90 days and it was honestly just a lot for me to keep up with. So last year we switched to discord. Unfortunately I've seen user participation plummet with this switch over the last ten months. We thought it'd be a better fit for us as we treated the forum more like a chat room anyway but it seems to have done the opposite.

I believe I still have a Xenforo license, and I'm trying to find the cheapest hosting that can run a forum for say 20 simultaneous users who post a ton and a lot of it is memes and spam. And I am also looking for advice for hosting attachments. That seemed to be what ate up our space last time quickly. We post a lot of attachments.

I used shared hosting ages ago like probably 2009 or so and we outgrew that but our community has shrank some since then. When I had the VPS I used Knownhost and had pretty good luck with them.

I mainly want a cheap hosting solution that has backups, an easy to use interface for database management and is managed so I don't have to worry about security I just keep Xenforo up to date and everything else is handled by someone else.

Any help would be massively appreciated.

 

[zappaDPJ]

Location might be a factor but here in the UK I've used https://www.tsohost.com/ for similar hosting purposes for many years, somewhere between 10 and 20 years without a complaint. Their shared hosting starts at £3.99 + VAT per month which includes cPanel for ease of use.

I generally use my shared allocation for testing purposes but I have run a Xenforo forum with a few hundred active members without any reported issues. Support is pretty decent with a response time within a few hours and I've never had any security concerns.

I can't comment on backup provision because the only person I trust as far as backups are concerned is me and cPanel/Cron jobs makes that easy enough.

 

[duderuud]

Check out Hetzner with locations in the US, Germany and Finland.

 

[Lee]

Knownhost are great. I suspect the shared hosting plans will be more than enough for your use case.

 

[JonathanW]

Knownhost are great. I suspect the shared hosting plans will be more than enough for your use case.

Yep your case is exactly why we started offering them again @John1744

 

[Gemma]

I've used KnownHost shared hosting for almost 3 years on my current site. I have their "Professional Web Hosting" package and have nothing but positive things to say about their hosting and customer service - first-class all-round service - I wouldn't look anywhere else for hosting now unless someone was kind enough to offer me free hosting lol

 

[Suzanne O]

I have been running a small forum for about twenty years for a group of internet friends who have all known each other since 2004. We have about fifty users, and ran vBulletin until about say 2019 or so when we switched to Xenforo. I was paying about $120 in hosting for a small VPS every 60 or 90 days and it was honestly just a lot for me to keep up with. So last year we switched to discord. Unfortunately I've seen user participation plummet with this switch over the last ten months. We thought it'd be a better fit for us as we treated the forum more like a chat room anyway but it seems to have done the opposite.

I believe I still have a Xenforo license, and I'm trying to find the cheapest hosting that can run a forum for say 20 simultaneous users who post a ton and a lot of it is memes and spam. And I am also looking for advice for hosting attachments. That seemed to be what ate up our space last time quickly. We post a lot of attachments.

I used shared hosting ages ago like probably 2009 or so and we outgrew that but our community has shrank some since then. When I had the VPS I used Knownhost and had pretty good luck with them.

I mainly want a cheap hosting solution that has backups, an easy to use interface for database management and is managed so I don't have to worry about security I just keep Xenforo up to date and everything else is handled by someone else.

Any help would be massively appreciated.

try these guys https://www.namecheap.com

 

[Muddy Boots]

CentMinMod VPS (@eva2000 on here) on Hetzner Server CX21 (See link in my sig) Euros 5.81 per month, cant go wrong, super fast and no host to have issues with and no problems......

Albeit you have to set it up and install but you will get plenty of help at @eva2000 's CMM forums

 

[Wing]

NFO web hosting. I pay $9 every 3 months…

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www.nfoservers.com

 

[Brian Jones]

I have been running a small forum for about twenty years for a group of internet friends who have all known each other since 2004. We have about fifty users, and ran vBulletin until about say 2019 or so when we switched to Xenforo. I was paying about $120 in hosting for a small VPS every 60 or 90 days and it was honestly just a lot for me to keep up with. So last year we switched to discord. Unfortunately I've seen user participation plummet with this switch over the last ten months. We thought it'd be a better fit for us as we treated the forum more like a chat room anyway but it seems to have done the opposite.

I believe I still have a Xenforo license, and I'm trying to find the cheapest hosting that can run a forum for say 20 simultaneous users who post a ton and a lot of it is memes and spam. And I am also looking for advice for hosting attachments. That seemed to be what ate up our space last time quickly. We post a lot of attachments.

I used shared hosting ages ago like probably 2009 or so and we outgrew that but our community has shrank some since then. When I had the VPS I used Knownhost and had pretty good luck with them.

I mainly want a cheap hosting solution that has backups, an easy to use interface for database management and is managed so I don't have to worry about security I just keep Xenforo up to date and everything else is handled by someone else.

Any help would be massively appreciated.

I use bluehost. 120 or so a year and have had no problems with them.