What's the best XenForo cloud / hosting solution in your opinion?

Best XF cloud / hosting solution

  • Total voters
    21
FTL

FTL

Well-known member
The title pretty much says it all. Note that this doesn't have to correspond to the cloud / hosting solution that you're currently using, just which one you think is the best. This may differ for many reasons such as your one is for work, affordability, skill level etc.

I'm on AWS and I think it's fanstastic. It offers flexibility that a standard hosting solution such as SiteGround can't hope to match. You can change literally everything about your hosting and at any time. Things like spec of server, how many servers, create and delete them at will, backup solutions, redundancy / resilience, choose from thousands of images to base your server on, or build your own, email sending and mailboxes, all in a secure environment. There's literally hundreds more functions available and you can even change the fixed IP address that your server sits on at any time! All this on a no-contract pay-as-you-go basis.

Yes, you do have to be careful with the costs and there's no handholding without paying for an expensive support plan so there can be quite a learning curve and it's not for computer novices who just wanna run a website. Something like XenForo Cloud would be suitable for them. However, if you're a computer literate / professional, then the AWS documentation is extensive and excellent, with very few typos.

I've just finished transferring the website to a new, improved server on AWS too, with all the latest software. It actually feels snappier even though it's running on the same spec virtual machine. Can't normally do that with standard hosting.

I tried Azure and it's of course a similar idea, but nowhere near as polished as AWS. The web interface is much slower and clunkier with a lot less of the nice touches that AWS has. Quite surprising really. No wonder AWS is number one.

Sorry if this sounds like an advert for AWS, but this is my honest impression of it since registering my account there back in March after checking out other solutions to hosting XenForo. I really do love it.
 
Anyone? This is a nice subject to talk about on here, very pertinent to running XF.
 
The problem for some of us, including me, is that we have only worked with one host so have no real basis for saying anything is the best. For basic shared hosting, I'm happy with my current host but they would be useless if I needed more. Their VPS offering has been "coming soon" for years. Size of board and the resulting technical requirements dictates a lot in terms of hosting. A host that is "best" for a small board that works fine on shared hosting probably won't be "best" for a large, high-traffic site that needs a dedicated server (real or virtual) and bandwidth. These days, that big site might be best-off, as you rightly suggest, in a cloud.
 
Yes, the best solution does depend on one's needs as you say, but also the quality of the product, which is why I worded the question generally like that.

One of the things that I really like about AWS, is that it scales easily from the tiddliest single page website right up to some massive corporate sized monolith (deep pockets required, of course). Also, if one is just getting started with AWS and has modest requirements, it's very cheap too since a number of critical products are free for a whole year (EC2 virtual server especially) costing an overall price of under $10 a month. This is especially great if you're on a learning curve like I was, starting from zero.

Literally, I looked in detail at the hosting market, didn't like what I saw in terms of outdated versions* of PHP, MySQL and server OS (Windows and Linux) from every hosting company and went straight to AWS where I can have the latest versions of everything and then customise my server any way I want.

One must always keep a careful eye on that pricing calculator though and steer clear of anything that could be expensive and believe me there are some functions that will hit you hard if you use them.

Watch out for hosting companies that are just AWS resellers with preset bundles though. Why pay them a premium to manage AWS and restrict your options when you can do it yourself for free, have all options available and isn't very hard to learn? The only reason I can see is if they provide specialist support for particular products that might genuinely be required and that doesn't seem to be too often.

*No wonder there are so many website compromises going on. Developers update their products for a reason and saying that some old version is still supported, eg PHP 7.4 doesn't cut it as it's still not as good as the latest one, especially for security. It should only be used strictly for compatibility reasons if that's a critical issue, otherwise get the latest. This is the situation for me right now: the only reason I'm not using the latest PHP 8.1.x is that XF devs advise against it until the product is fully updated for it, so I'm still on the latest 8.0.x version for now which works beautifully.

Also, people cite potential issues with the latest versions of software which can break critical infrastructure that can't afford to go down and that can be true, so just hold off a bit and look at product announceents, user feedback on forums etc and above all, do your own testing.

In the case of PHP, it's a piece of cake to just roll back to a previous version if problems occur. This happened to me a few months ago where XF crashed completely with the latest version at the time (8.0.7 I think). I then just selected the previous version in the web server and all was fine again. When the version after that came out, I installed it and everything was fine yet again.
 
Last edited:
I very much like and recommend KnownHost.

https://www.knownhost.com/

KnownHost has excellent technical support via support ticket system.

For very small forums the shared (Professional Web Hosting) cost $19.95 per month which includes cPanel.

For medium sized forums the managed VPS is an excellent choice. I suggest getting WHM/cPanel. There are 4 VPS offering which work very well.

https://www.knownhost.com/managed-vps.html
 
I'm using OVH for years now. Never had any issues. Their support can be awful. But prices are good for what you get.
 
sixlxvi said:
Can confirm. I have opened many tickets in the last 2 years and every single one of them was replied to in literally minutes.
Click to expand...
That's one thing I've liked about my provider. They are small and cheap, but the support has been excellent so far. The only thing I got grumpy about was their slowness in updating MariaDB on their shared hosting (I discovered we were on an unsupported release and had to bug to find out that they did, in fact, have a project underway to update their servers).
 
To do what? 🙂

It’s a fully managed service which is configured and optimised for the sole purpose of running XenForo.

There isn’t really anything you would need a control panel for, assuming you mean something like cPanel.
 
I was going to suggest changing the appearance of the xenForo Cloud | Self-Hosted xenForo link section but it looks like someone has already caught on to it and updated the style.

It gave me the first impression that xenForo Cloud was the only option available unless I decided to continue scrolling.
 
AndyB said:
I very much like and recommend KnownHost.

https://www.knownhost.com/

KnownHost has excellent technical support via support ticket system.

For very small forums the shared (Professional Web Hosting) cost $19.95 per month which includes cPanel.

For medium sized forums the managed VPS is an excellent choice. I suggest getting WHM/cPanel. There are 4 VPS offering which work very well.

https://www.knownhost.com/managed-vps.html
Click to expand...
Same here, this has been a great service all around. Over the last year since I've began using them I've never had any downtime or speed issues and any time I've put in a request they've been excellent about both response times and getting it done.
 
On desktop, your background image overwhelms the visibility of the logo. Not enough contrast imo. Very excited to see the launch of the cloud.

BvDAOQT.png
 
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