Really simple Presales Q re Hosting

[RallyFan]

Hi all,

First time poster, and you'll have to excuse me for asking what might be a really dumb question.

Firstly, I'm looking to create a forum from scratch but am on a super tight budget. It won't be that big or popular (if I got 100 members with 20 active I'll be happy). At it's busiest if it takes off I'd project maybe 15,000-20,000 members and 100-150 active members online at a time. If it took off I'd fork out more $$$ for the forum.

After much reading on here throughout the night, I noticed people are saying that it can be run on shared hosting. I'm guessing that's Shared Web Hosting (like most places offer?)

The idea of a self managed VPS worries me, and since I want to host locally in Australia (Sydney to be exact), Shared Web Hosting would be ideal for my budget as well.

I've read RAM and HDD requirements, and having done some web work in the past I know some CSS/PHP and know my way around Wordpress.


Most web hosting companies give you access to cPanel, and within cPanel you can launch Installatron and chose from a number of software packages (normally that how I would install Wordpress), and then access files via cPanel File Manager (thus no need for FTP or anything).

My question is this: How does one actually install Xenforo if they buy it then? If it doesn't show up under Installatron, there is no way from what I can tell to manually install things (as you don't have root access to shared web hosting). Or am I missing something here (keep in mind it's 2AM and my brains flicked off).

I'm looking at something like this:
https://ventraip.com.au/web-hosting/shared/ and taking out the Freedom plan or this https://www.micron21.com/order/customise/#edit/99e781bd-4492-e56b-f1d3-9675bbc2096c
https://www.dreamithost.com.au/web-hosting/#1554955330890-8cac1937-b8da

Thanks for anyones assistance on this one and sorry if it's a really thick question.

Oh and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Cheers!

 

[Chris D]

If you have cPanel then the file manager can be used to upload the XF zip, extract it and then move the files into place.

You then just visit the install script which takes care of the rest (you’ll need to create a database too but cPanel should provide an interface for that too).

More info in the manual: https://xenforo.com/xf2-docs/manual/install-upgrade/

 

[RallyFan]

If you have cPanel then the file manager can be used to upload the XF zip, extract it and then move the files into place.

You then just visit the install script which takes care of the rest (you’ll need to create a database too but cPanel should provide an interface for that too).

More info in the manual: https://xenforo.com/xf2-docs/manual/install-upgrade/

Thanks for your reply Chris D.

Wow so it's just as easy as manually installing Wordpress plugins! I'd have never thought that.

So the primary danger in using shared hosting "which meets requirements" (at least for a small forum like mine), is if the provider changes settings in the future and breaks something? Or are all the requirements for Xenforo pretty much inline with "industry standard"?

I suppose thinking about it, it isn't much different to how Wordpress uses a MySQL database and PHP, except instead of serving web pages you are serving threads.

 

[Chris D]

Indeed. If you have hosting that can run WordPress then it should be ok to run XF too.

As a benchmark, try to ensure that the hosting supports MySQL 5.5 and PHP 7.0 as minimum. Everything beyond that should be fairly standard.

 

[RallyFan]

Indeed. If you have hosting that can run WordPress then it should be ok to run XF too.

As a benchmark, try to ensure that the hosting supports MySQL 5.5 and PHP 7.0 as minimum. Everything beyond that should be fairly standard.

Thanks Chris. Really appreciate your input .. Everything I've read points to Xenforo being very streamlined and generally pretty happy with a wide variety of hosting setups.

Mosts hosts support that these days (and those that don't I wouldn't bother with (as WP runs a heap better on PHP7.x to 5.x)).

I guess the only potential questionmark moving forwards would be how many other hosts are using resources on that server, and how it will impact performance. I'll just go with a better host/package to prevent that.

I recently had a customer on shared hosting via Wordpress. Site ran great and nice / responsive, except from about 5pm onwards to about 2AM when everyone must have been running their backups, thus lagging the site badly. Definitely can't have that for a forum.