Hi all. I'm about to start setting up my first forum and I've been told xenForo is the way to go.
While fairly tech literate (in SQL and Python) I have never set up and maintained a website or forum.
I haven't arranged anywhere to host the site yet, so I'm happy to take advice on the best place to go for this?
I expect that I will have around 500 members if I'm lucky, with no more than about 50 online at any one time.
Also, am I setting myself up for a very time consuming and costly hobby here?
Hi so check this out. I've been all over on this. So first, depends on your budget. I can tell you that running your own dedicated server or cloud instance is the way to go.
So for a dedicated server, you can get a server for 35ish to 80ish euro per month with a 1GIG connection and between 64gb of 128gb of ram, with at least a 512gb ssd drive.
https://hetzner.com
With hetzner, you can get the AX61 and it's an AMD 12core/24thread, 128gb ram, 4tb NVME of space and it runs 80ish euro a month and love it! I run proxmox on it and have a wiki i built for it -
https://plexguide.com/wiki/proxmox/ - My website is running on this server along with other instances, windows server, some linux boxes and etc. I use plesk, $15 a month. Install an ubuntu server instance, install plesk, login and bam, good to go. Use cloudflare and your set. This would run around $95ish a month.
Now if you want there 6700k processor with 64gb of ram with 2 x 512gb nvme drives, you can merge them and make them a 1024gb merged drive or have one as a backup. Use proxmox. Now I recommend plesk still because you can link your google drive and it will backup your entire website whenever you want! And that would run about 35ish euro per month with plesk being $15.
Now if you wanna start cheap, you can goto hetzner.cloud - get a cloud instance that has like 4 processor and 8gb of ram and about 80 - 160gb of space. Turn on daily snapshots and your good to go. Dedicated IP. Just pick ubuntu, install plesk, upload your software via ftp and your good to go. I know it works because before i went to a dedicated, I had 13000 members, with about 20-30 at a time with about 200 visitors and worked fine. You get a 1GIG connection with 20TB of bandwidth! This route runs about 10-15 euro a month with plesk $15 a month.
Trust me, my site runs using servers and we found hetzner and wholesaleinternet to be the best. Why both give you unlimited bandwidth (wholesale is 100TB a month) and no worries. But ya, use this guide for proxmox if you need to -
https://plexguide.com/wiki/proxmox/
Good luck!
AND ... CPANEL is stupid for it's cost. Don't go with it! Unless your doing some major reselling!
PLESK LOGINS, yes easy
Simple!!!!
Odd TidBits
- On this server, xenforo with plesk runs about 1.5% processing power with the AMD 3900.
- When sending mass message, the cpu spikes to about 25% of (12core,24threads) for the AMD 3900 and RAM increases.
- When running tons of jobs and messages, it can use about 8-16gb of RAM.
- This is all on NVME drives.
