A XenForo host with dynamic scaling?

[TalkingCrocodile]

I recently found out about Closte web hosting for WordPress and I thought it was good.
You pay for what you use. The compute auto-scales based on visits.
A post becomes popular, the compute will scale to respond to all requests
the sudden rush stops and it auto-scales down again.

There are no limits on the max number of connections or PHP workers.

Anyone doing this on the XenForo side?

 

[Cupara]

I honestly can't say I've heard any XenForo customers utilizing that type of hosting but it sounds like it would be good for any type of forum that way they don't have to worry about upgrading resources to match a sudden rush of new activity.

 

[TalkingCrocodile]

I have spent more time looking into it.
The means to do so have existed for a long time but the cost of doing it has been too expensive for small businesses.

Now there are at least 2 different products out that can be used without a big investment.
Closte appears to run on top of Google CloudRun,
There is no reason by doing it with XenForo would not be just as good.
Closte does a very good job of hiding the complexity.

DigitalOcean has a product out now that might be comparable but at the disclosed prices it is a lot more expensive.

When the whole running applications in the cloud-first came out, this is how I imagined it would be.
I was very disappointed when I saw that all your got was EC2 pick a compute computer with a size
that fits your needs I was disappointed.

It should be auto-scaling to start with.

We have had autoscaling via AWS at work for a couple of fo years now at least, but it a beast to get running,
and not at all made for "run a PHP app for me"

 

[Cupara]

Well the best I can say is if you haven't purchased a license, do that and give it a go then you can be the first to release your own setup, benchmark, etc guide here one XenForo. I may give a try just got testing purposes once my finances are back in the positive.

 

[VersoBit]

We operate a very similar idea for XenForo on Fellowsfilm (see signature). We use Kubernetes to dynamically scale both horizontally and vertically.

An installation like this is not really cheap (in terms of configuration and dev hours) and to be honest, you'd get a better experience just renting a dedicated server (think hetzner server auctions).

 

[Lucas]

I work with Kubernetes too and it can probably scale like crazy but it's definitely a very expensive setup. I would only use it on a huge site.

 

[Xon]

An installation like this is not really cheap (in terms of configuration and dev hours) and to be honest, you'd get a better experience just renting a dedicated server (think hetzner server auctions).

Modern dedicated servers have a huge amount of performance. Anything with enterprise NVMe with make the database fly, and after that you need lots of cores which is very doable in today's hardware market.

 

[briansol]

agreed with most of the above. Unless you're a news type site that hits peaks on release day, it's probably not going to save you money to set it up that way.

If you are, it's probably still cheaper to leverage Cloudflare's caching of static content. you can serve guests 15 or 30 min old cache and it puts nearly no load on your server.

 

[⭐ Alex ⭐]

We have had autoscaling via AWS at work for a couple of fo years now at least, but it a beast to get running,

You mean using elastic beanstalk? It's difficult to setup?

 

[eva2000]

+1 what @Xon and @briansol said - pair modern server hardware/hosting with Cloudflare CDN caching of static assets and even doing full HTML page guest caching if on CF Business plan or via CF Worker custom caching and you can smooth out the traffic spikes for guest visitors at least. But CF caching is only for guests so logged in users need a good server with optimised web server, PHP and MySQL server.

Auto scaling is nice but due to costs probably more reserved for for-profit sites as Amazon AWS EC2 like hosts just bandwidth costs alone can set you back US$90-120+ per TB at least. If it's a hobby forum or non-business forum, probably cheaper to go dedicated server route with fixed and expected costs.

Cloudflare Cache stats below handling a nice spike of requests all cache hits not touching my forum server