What OS to use, when installing xenforo?

[farber]

I want to install xenforo on my vps but I am not sure of what OS to use and what panel I should go with.
Right now my vps is on centos 7 and I want to go with VestaCP but I don't know if it's good.
Any recommendations?

 

[Muddy Boots]

The only way to run a forum unless it has little traffic is on a CentMinMod CentOS7 Server (VPS or Dedicated) in my humble opinion.....

By forum I mean XenForo, vB, Invision or other....

As for difficulty, after running cPanel servers for many years and having various bits fall over with updates, Contacting cPanel with support tickets, CMM is far far easier with less hiccups and the support is far superior, combine that with a decent VPS provider (I use Vultr and Hetzner) with snapshots and automated backups and the ability to clone a server to another, its really the only way... The other thing is the cost of cPanel which has escalated in recent years astronomically when they got taken over...

And by far the best way to run the email server (again in my humble opnion after many years) is to offload this from your forum server and either outsource it (No point me listing them when CMM has a list here ) - My personal choice that I use is Namecheaps PrivateMail paid for facility which works out pretty cheap or run a cPanel server for the emails.

The beauty of a separate server for the emails is is the forum goes down or is taken offline the mail still works and vice versa...

Letsencrypt SSL is a breeze to set up and use on CMM.....

And Nginx is a totally great web server, after coming from 15 years of Apache it was fairly easy to pick up...

I had to buy a license just to be able to make this post

 

[Paul B]

I had to buy a license just to be able to make this post

 

[Black Tiger]

I had to buy a license just to be able to make this post

Luckily you're not on IPB so you don't have to renew your license anymore to be able to post (in most sections).

 

[briansol]

The only way to run a forum unless it has little traffic is on a CentMinMod CentOS7 Server (VPS or Dedicated) in my humble opinion.....

By forum I mean XenForo, vB, Invision or other....

As for difficulty, after running cPanel servers for many years and having various bits fall over with updates, Contacting cPanel with support tickets, CMM is far far easier with less hiccups and the support is far superior, combine that with a decent VPS provider (I use Vultr and Hetzner) with snapshots and automated backups and the ability to clone a server to another, its really the only way... The other thing is the cost of cPanel which has escalated in recent years astronomically when they got taken over...

And by far the best way to run the email server (again in my humble opnion after many years) is to offload this from your forum server and either outsource it (No point me listing them when CMM has a list here ) - My personal choice that I use is Namecheaps PrivateMail paid for facility which works out pretty cheap or run a cPanel server for the emails.

The beauty of a separate server for the emails is is the forum goes down or is taken offline the mail still works and vice versa...

Letsencrypt SSL is a breeze to set up and use on CMM.....

And Nginx is a totally great web server, after coming from 15 years of Apache it was fairly easy to pick up...

I had to buy a license just to be able to make this post

I mean, that's dedication right there!

I have no doubts in the product. The doubts are within myself and my time/commitment i have these days to learn it and be comfortable running it.
cpanel is easy/autopilot for me these days. yes, it's almost as much as my server. 25 for the server and 20 for the cpanel license a month and it is on my list to do for cost reduction efforts to keep my dying-niche forum alive a little bit longer (eg, profitable).

 

[eva2000]

I had to buy a license just to be able to make this post

wow, that IS dedication! Much appreciated

The doubts are within myself and my time/commitment i have these days to learn it and be comfortable running it.

Yeah, Centmin Mod isn't for everyone. The key is to remove the barrier of fear of messing up and using a test hourly VPS server as the best way to just get a feel and learn the ropes in your schedule/time without touching your live sites yet. Getting Started Guide after initial install should help. If you want more advanced install steps, they can be found on the official blog at https://blog.centminmod.com/2019/07/15/117/centmin-mod-advanced-customised-installation-guide/. My signature link has a specific guide for Xenforo 2.

I created Centmin Mod for performance after 20yrs of optimizing forum clients' servers on vBulletin and Xenforo. FYI, ~10% of the largest Xenforo forums actually run on Centmin Mod LEMP stack CentOS 7 servers https://community.centminmod.com/th...p-powers-10-of-xenforos-largest-forums.16435/. As do many high traffic non-forum sites https://blog.centminmod.com/2021/10/18/2622/http-archives-core-web-vital-technology-report/

cpanel is easy/autopilot for me these days. yes, it's almost as much as my server. 25 for the server and 20 for the cpanel license a month and it is on my list to do for cost reduction efforts to keep my dying-niche forum alive a little bit longer (eg, profitable).

I can relate. 99% of my servers are now Centmin Mod based saving me an equivalent of US$65,000+ per year in cPanel license fees I've been a cPanel user for ~16yrs and some of how they configure stuff has rubbed off on my Centmin Mod development i.e. main hostname vs site domains. Centmin Mod was started in 2011 as a fork of the original Centmin Mod so ~10yrs of part-time work on the side.

But on topic, as to OS to use for Xenforo, my advice is to use whichever OS you're most comfortable with. It's not what you use that matters but how you use it. I use CentOS/RPM distros as I know them like the back of my hand. So if you're not sure which OS to use, try each one and see which you have a better feel for.

 

[Muddy Boots]

The doubts are within myself and my time/commitment i have these days to learn it and be comfortable running it.
cpanel is easy/autopilot for me these days. yes, it's almost as much as my server. 25 for the server and 20 for the cpanel license a month and it is on my list to do for cost reduction efforts to keep my dying-niche forum alive a little bit longer (eg, profitable).

CMM is not a steep learning curve at all, I would say its easier than cpanel.... Only thing you need to do is run a separate mail server - You can run a mail server on the CMM server and there is info on this on Evas site but its by far easier to outsource it like I said above.

As per the above post get a cheap hourly vps and have a play, youll save $20 for cpanel and may be able to run on a slimmer server without the bloat of cpanel.....

 

[motowebmaster]

I run a large forum on Almalinux on 16gig of RAM and could do it with with 8gig if necessary. I'm also running Litespeed/LSCache/Redis.

There are times when my RAM is fully utilized, but a change to one of my backup processes will fix that.

Used to run the same forum on 32gig of RAM when I was at OVH but made some tweaks to overcome that, which actually helped speed up my particular site.

 

[Marcus]

Currently everyone gets a free latest-gen ARM t4g.small (2Core 2GB RAM) from AWS until the rest of this year - that will get you started and you have some time to play around for free even if you do not have access anymore to their first free year. Cache everything out to a CDN add a mail server and some elasticsearch.

@eva2000 setup is nice and you can learn from it how to setup your own nginx if that's what you want to do.

 

[Forsaken]

Oracle Cloud also has a free for life tier: https://cloud.oracle.com/free

 

[Marcus]

Oracle Cloud also has a free for life tier: https://cloud.oracle.com/free

Thanks, that sounds kind of massive.

 

[Forsaken]

Thanks, that sounds kind of massive.

Somewhat? You can get a 4Core, 24GB Ram ARM Ampere server which works for some things.

There's quite a bit you can do on the free tier, but it's dependent on what you need.

 

[Marcus]

I honestly can not believe that. I will go check that out. Thank you so much ! I currently work on the free 2 Core (up to 20% CPU core useage) ARM 2GB RAM (free this year, and fast) with 10GB SSD (for that I pay, and it is multiple times faster than the offer they had a few years ago) and it even works out with caching. The hardware and the software are fast now and much more effective than two decades ago. There were times I paid three figures a month for servers and a service who "maintains" them.

Thank you so much, unbelievable Oracle offers this.