Hosting for a large forum

[Orit]

Hello,
We have a fairly large website, currently hosted at AWS.

In the past year the bills have skyrocketed so we are looking for other solutions.
We have:
8.7M posts
95.9K users

17M monthly page views.

Our S3 (all the attachments etc.) is in wasabi, so we managed to cut costs there, but the AWS bills are still very high.
We are probably paying for more than we need but are seriously looking into moving to different hosting.

What would you recommend for the hosting requirements?
Thanks!!

 

[TPerry]

There are WAY to many variables involved. You have to look at your attachments in the first place... are you STILL going to need S3 from Amazon or R2 from Cloudflare if it exceeds your VPS instance? Can you afford the around $200 a month it now costs for a decent (at minimum) dedicated server with adequate hardware RAID provisioned?
What I'm trying to get at, there is no simple "answer" that can be provided.
You don't indicate how much you are paying for your AWS service. You don't indicate how much storage you are using.
A simple AMD based 256GB RAM/2x3.84 SSD storage from Hetzner is going to run you around $270USD a month easily.
Even with OVH for a decent Intel dual processor server you are looking around $600 with 2Gbps unmetered, 4 960GB SSD hardware RAID drives and 192GB of RAM. Unluckily... dedicated servers have DRASTICALLY increased in price recently.

 

[rdn]

If Germany's server is fine for you, grab some from here:

Dedicated Server Hosting

Find your reliable dream server, optimized for high capacity use, ever-growing storage needs or rapid and parallel processing.

www.hetzner.com

If you prefer US-based

https://www.reliablesite.net/dedicated-servers/

If you need DDOS protection, choose OVH.

OVHcloud Full Dedicated Server Range

Your OVHcloud dedicated server meets the most demanding requirements: Virtualisation, Cloud computing, Stockage, Firewall, Load balancing, Unlimited traffic...

www.ovhcloud.com

I would advise:

• 4 core / 8 thread CPU as minimum (6c/12t for long term plan)
• NVMe based Disk
• For your forum size, 32GB RAM would work (64GB would be great for long term usage)
• $100 USD per month or less without a CP license, just bare metal
• As Tracy said, host for static and attachment files on R2 and enable CloudFlare Guest caching to lessen the origin server load

 

[Orit]

Thank you so much @Tracy Perry

are you STILL going to need S3 from Amazon

We aren't using amazon s3, we've moved to wasabi, so we've significantly cut those costs.
We are paying much more than $270USD a month for AWS services, so anything lower than that would be obviously great...

I'll pass it all on to our team.

I would advise:

• 4 core / 8 thread CPU as minimum (6c/12t for long term plan)
• NVMe based Disk
• For your forum size, 32GB RAM (64GB would be great for long term usage)
• $100 USD per month or less without a CP license, just bare metal
• As Tracy said, host for static and attachment files on R2 and enable CloudFlare Guest caching to lessen the origin server load

Thank you @rdn for your detailed reply.
We are already storing S3 separately, and have enabled the guest caching.

You've helped us a lot!

 

[fly]

If you're not already, I'd suggest using Cloudflare to save some bandwidth costs. And are using a compute savings plans or reserved instances? Autoscaling? All of those could likely save you some $$$.

 

[JonathanW]

I know a guy

 

[briansol]

The #1 thing i did to reduce my aws egress costs was to move my site to a provider that is in the bandwidth alliance https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/. See sig. I use vultr. My aws bills are 20% of what they used to be due to the bandwidth savings.

The #2 thing i did was to optimize all the attachments. savings of gigs and gigs of space and bandwidth.

i posted about how i did it through cloudflare caching rules cloudfront, and s3 settings

Moving UK host to UK shared or VPS - Suggestions ?

We're currently based on a VPS in the UK. We've been given potential notice to leave because they want everyone using there own in-house management software rather than plesk or cpanel. While this isn't a major issue in itself, it does force our hand a bit because it's just so expensive...

xenforo.com

 

[fly]

Oh, and if EC2 compute costs are high, you can also check out https://autospotting.io/