What's the best way to host a XenForo site with flexible bandwidth?

[Rayman]

If you don't mind a basic control panel (but still get root access) then I would recommend the following setup:

• https://www.serverpilot.io for control panel (free - this will turn your VPS into a web server, extremely easy, just enter your root user/pass and that's it)
  
• https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ or https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ for the VPS (1 Core with 768MB or 1GB RAM will be enough)
• Amazon SES for outgoing emails (or SendGrid or Mailgun if you don't exceed their free allowances).
• https://www.zoho.com/mail/ for incoming emails (free), otherwise setup your own mail server such as https://mailinabox.email/
• CloudFlare

You could try the free-tier Amazon EC2 with ServerPilot but I haven't tried it, so I can't really speak for that.

 

[Marcus]

My Xenforo is on Amazon AWS and yes, I could literally scale more or less indefinitely - and its mostly done automatic. The only limitation is the Database, but you can scale a single database server up to 244 GB RAM. You can start like 20 of these servers within 5 minutes, if you want to start more just write an Email to Amazon and they will open your limits. The limits are there, because - you will pay for it. All clients communicate with Cloud"front" first, this scales indefinitely without any help. Currently more than 50% of the user requests are done by cloudfront and will never touch any other service from Amazon.

The setup takes a long time, and the cloud does not work like a server. It is very different. You will learn a lot, but for flexible bandwidth, I guess I would not do that. I'd just prefer to pay more for a decent server. The cloud is a hobby!

 

[CrispinP]

Try CloudFlare first. It's free and takes minutes to setup. It'll offload all the IO of images and static files.
Also enable XF caching does help in making it snappier.

Moving to something like AWS is a pain. Try the free, easy stuff first.
My Cloud Flare traffic for today.

 

[rdn]

You could Imagine how much I would be paying on AWS compare to Cloudflare $20 USD per month only

 

[CrispinP]

Dang that is some throughput.

 

[Blandt]

I have a site that is normally pretty quiet (100 active users most days) in the off season but can get a lot busier when there is a related event going on (between 300 to 450 active users).

I'm paying a lot of money monthly and the site can often be slow or unresponsive.

Can anyone recommend a way to flexibly host my site where the monthly cost is low but if there is unexpected traffic then I can pay a (non extortionate) top up fee without the site going down?

We have a large database too so we would need some RAM and disk space.

Should I move to cloud hosting?

Get an 8GB VPS with Linode for 40 bucks, and use nginx. no need to scale up or down. it should handle everything you need.
Doubled your traffic in few years ? easy click and upgrade to 12.
DigitalOcean are awesome too but a little more expensive.

Another idea is to get a 4GB VPS for the web server and an 8GB for the SQL server at the same Linode (or digitalocean) location. more secure and it can handle 4 times your need
but you need to know your way around the server (no panels or software to set things up, everything is console command line)

 

[Blandt]

How does Cloudfare work?

Cloudflare works as a proxy, it caches most of your static files then serves them directly to your user. it helps a little with bandwidth, but you got to have the server muscle to handle your traffic.
Highly recommended but they are not an alternative to alleviate traffic