Which hosting provider would you recommend, or warn against?

EdSt

New member
Which hosting provider for XenForo would you recommend, or warn against?

Currently looking at (but suggestions are MORE than welcome :) ):

one.com
godaddy.com
siteground.com

Any thoughts?
 
Cool - thanks.
I'm trying out A2 and so far, nothing to moan about.(y)

If nothing else, my insistence in pursuing the matter with One.CON had led to their support staff changing their scripts from "supporting XenForo" to:

Their [xenforo]system requirements list (on the bottom of https://xenforo.com/purchase/ ) states "Common PHP functions must not be disabled" but we have a long list of common PHP functions which are disabled for security and stability reasons.

Now I just have to wait 48 hours since the matter has been escalated to the one.CON "complaints dept"...a hidden department and as if my intentions weren't clear from the start.....so entering a phase of: "someone knocking on the door.....let's hide and wait to see if they go away!!":X3::X3::X3::X3:
 
I'll have a look....soon!

Kinda don't want to:X3:.....but after battling with One.CON..........if/when problems do arise, I should be prepared for anything.....I hope! :rolleyes:

Thanks

PS....btw, can I sue you for a new keyboard?
Your response has left my current keyboard covered in :coffee:....and I%£*Kfear)(*&^@:Lit£"&(Hmight;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;be09234kjhfdsjkaffected234lkjqfkjasdf?
 
Result with One.CON.....but still attempting to deny any and all legal responsibility after mis-selling and misrepresentation of "the truth, before and after buying from them!

Customer Care - lvm
Hello Steen, Thank you getting in touch with us. I understand that you are not happy that we do not support Xenforo and that we gave the wrong advice regarding this. You have also mentioned that you do not agree with our refund policy. Let me first apologize for the information about Xenforo. Our basis for saying that it should work is the documentation about requirements provided by Xenforo on their website. This states requirements that we do support. However, some setting in PHP are turned off with us to ensure security and operational reliability. Tests of the same installation on other web spaces with us show that Xenoforo sometimes require some PHP functions we do not support, and therefore it might not work. We rely on requirements pages from CMS' documentation as we cannot test or know all of them. After you made us aware of this, we have updated our internal documentation, so our supporters can advice properly. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Regarding our refund policy, then we offer 15 day money back guarantee for web spaces and the first domain. This is due to the fact that the price of the domain is something we pay on your behalf to the domain regitry. And when we close a web space within the 15 days, we do not cancel the domain, you get to keep this. This is legal as it is a rule outside the usual 14 day guarentee there is for online sales, as this right is waved when activating the web spaces. We have explained this in our terms: "In relationships between consumer and retailer, a right of withdrawal exists by which the customer has the right of withdrawing an order until 14 days after placing the order but domains are unique and web spaces are individually manufactured and customized for the domain. For a faster delivery of the product, One.com will usually begin the manufacturing and customizing of the product as soon as the order is received. By ordering, the customer accepts that any right of withdrawal will be dismissed as soon as One.com has started processing the ordered product." As you are still within the 15 days I can of course cancel the two orders if you wish and refund you the expenses. As a special gesture, I can offer you to also refund you the second domain cost as well. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me here.
Best Regards Lykke Customer Care Coordinator
Please see my complaint on your FB page 3/3
Added May 30, 2018 8:19 AM
S Brix
Hi Lykke, Lyder som en dansker? But let's keep it it english, has a wider audience impact worldwide. Please initiate & refund any and everything I have purchased from one.com. I just received notification from one.com of my payment via PayPal today so I know you have received it! Both purchases totalling approx £104 As you can see from yesterday's interaction with your pre-sales support member - full 14MBG if I am not satisfied.......should mean full money back guarantee within 14 days, not your convoluted version and an attempt to "pretend" you are doing me a favour by refunding me products and services I was mis-sold by one.com!!!! Imagine buying something over the counter (in DK?), realising you had been mis-sold the product by the shop assistant but upon asking for a refund, the shop assistant tells you it is "company policy" to deduct the time and effort the assistant put into processing your purchase and (mis) advising you!!!!!! Please notify me how and when the full refund will be made, ASAP! Steen


How much should I invoice them for making them aware of the errors in the information they have on XF2?:ROFLMAO:
 
Yippee.........but....can they damage anything when wiping everything? Nothing installed, data or otherwise, in wordpress and XF2 needed for future use, elsewhere.
I've got new domain names elsewhere and uploaded XF2 there.

From one.com:

"Before I start closing the web spaces down and refunding, is there anything on them you need to save? I see you have a Wordpress installation on judonewsanddebate.co.uk that you might want to save data from."

Any advice, greatly appreciated!
 
Yippee.........but....can they damage anything when wiping everything? Nothing installed, data or otherwise, in wordpress and XF2 needed for future use, elsewhere.
I've got new domain names elsewhere and uploaded XF2 there.

From one.com:

"Before I start closing the web spaces down and refunding, is there anything on them you need to save? I see you have a Wordpress installation on judonewsanddebate.co.uk that you might want to save data from."

Any advice, greatly appreciated!
You are not licensed user. You have to buy XenForo license after you will access have to customer support.
 
I'm trying out A2 and so far, nothing to moan about.
Can you please confirm which package are you trying from A2hosting? Is it shared hosting turbo? Also, can you please let me know what is the settings they maintain for PHP max_user_connections and max_connections. I contacted them several times via email and twitter, never answered this question.
 
Not happy with HostGator at the moment. I've spent the last 4 months getting ready to switch over from an 11 year old server which I owned to a VPS plan with HG. Dec 21st, I made the switch, updating from vB to XF2 in the process. Everything seemed to go well.

Bear with me, this might be a bit long...

Part of the reason for switching was also email related. I am NOT a server admin or IT person at all. I am a mechanical engineer by day and flailing admin by night. My site has been up for 15 years though and during that time, I had various forum members that helped me out. Unfortunately, I did not realize there were issues with my email setup for emails going out from the forum. The guy that set it up had moved away and I had no real reason to think something was amiss.

Over the years, I would occasionally send out a mass mail to my users. Each time, I might get back 30-50 bounces due to bad email addresses. If the user had not been active on the site in a few years, I might nuke their account. More often though, I just put them in a "Deadmail" usergroup. This group couldn't do much of anything other than log in and contact the admins. This worked well to get people to update old email addresses. My last mass mail was about six years ago.

Two weeks before my recent move to HostGator, I sent out a mass email to all my users to let them know the site would be going down and why. Of 21.5K emails sent out, I got back about 1500 emails, higher than normal, which was my first indication that there might be an issue. I noticed a LOT of the accounts were users that had registered and been approved, but their last activity date was exactly the same as their registration date. This got me to thinking there were issues with them not getting the emails letting them know their accounts were approved. In the process of getting ready for the move, I was asking some IT related users on my site about this and they started asking all kinds of questions to which I did not have answers. The long and short of it was that my server's outbound email was not setup with valid (or any) DKIM/DMARC DNS entries. I use G Suite for all my regular email.

So, we worked out what all the correct entries needed to be after the changeover to the new VPS and upgrade to XF. After the changeover, members were still sporadically getting emails, some not at all. We did some more work using dmarcian.com, mxtoolbox.com, etc,... When I thought I finally had everything fixed, I sent out a mass mail to my users to let them know about the changeover and prompting them to come see the new site.

It all went downhill from there. 😧

Right off the bat, I knew something was wrong. I started getting a LOT of undeliverable replies. In fact, it climbed to over 10K and now sits at almost 18K!! I've been uploading dmarc reports from email providers non-stop. Then around noon on Dec 31, I get an email from HostGator warning about a spam complaint. It was from ONE user account, one that had not been active at all since the day it was created in 2006... They also linked me to the CAN-SPAM act. I immediately sent a reply explaining what I was doing, how I was trying to contact my users, how I was trying to get the email into compliance with the DKIM/DMARC requirements, etc,...

I got no reply.

I woke up New Years day to find that my site had been suspended. The email they sent me mentioned NOTHING about email issues. Rather, it stated that they had detected malware on my site. Their tech support was useless. They just kept telling me that I had to get rid of the malware and then they could lift the suspension. Having zero experience with this stuff, I tried using clamAV in cPanel to no avail. I buckled and signed up for a year of SiteLock scanning/cleaning. HG's support people assured me that once I got a clean bill of health from SiteLock, I would be good to go. So, many hours and hundreds of dollars later, I did indeed get a clean bill of health. In fact, they could find NO problems at all to begin with. When I got back with HG tech support, they said they could not lift the suspension because the "infected content" still existed. The email they sent me showed,

/home/twtexco/public_html/forums

as the infected content. Tech support said that until I removed the entire directory structure, they could not help me!!??

I went back to the email sent to let me know the site was suspended and replied to it, letting them know the results of the SiteLock investigation. They took about six hours to respond and finally informed me that there was in fact NO malware, but that they had received more spam complaints and thus decided to shut me down. After reviewing the emails, they decided I was legit and finally lifted the suspension, over 16 hours after imposing it.

They never gave me a chance to shut down email and never acknowledged my initial response to their original warning about spam.

Now they are also informing me about their requirement for double opt-in for users to receive ANY emails from a forum!? According to them, creating an account, agreeing to the TOS, and responding to the confirmation email doesn't count. I have 21+K users from over 15 years of running my site. How in the world could they claim anything about what those users did or did not do with respect to opting in or out of anything!? I've had like 5 new users since I made the change over.

Here is their policy on the double opt in

I am miffed about how they handled this. Prior to purchasing their VPS plan, I explicitly told them I was going to use it to run a forum and that there would be a lot of outbound emails. They never mentioned anything about their double opt in policy. They just kept telling me it would be perfect for my needs... :rolleyes:

Is anyone else dealing with a double opt in policy imposed by a service provider?

If I try to move away from HG, I could lose a crap load of money because they claim they do not do refunds or prorate anything after the first 45 days. Of course, I don't want to run into similar issues with another hosting service.

How do you guys handle emails? Are you sending them via sendmail on your server or some other way?

This email issue is literally killing my forum and has been for years without me even realizing it.
 
Thats quite a story and agonizing to experience. Before I go into possible solutions, please consider to add your review of hostgator here so that others can learn from your horrible experience.

I would immediately switch hosts. Hostgator is not known for good support. Contact @MattW
Email requires an entirely different approach than web hosting. I use Amazon SES for email. But it has limits on bounces. You can clean your mailing list with this addon:
After that is done and only valid email addresses will be sent to, then add Amazon SES and make sure its configured well. Add bounce notifications through SES and manually process these daily. Here is a useful thread on how to set it up:
https://xenforo.com/community/threads/amazon-ses-and-xenforo.128853/

Join all email feedback loops:
https://www.emailfeedbackloops.com/
 
I second the recommendation to use eva2000's CentMin Mod if going the VPS route. I was a System Manager for most of my IT career, including Linux management for the last few years, before retiring a few years ago, but I didn't want to have to bother with various administration tasks if I were to go with a VPS/unmanaged solution. Once I found the CentMin Mod, I discovered that most of the Linux administration tasks, especially those related to running a forum product such as Xenforo, were taken care of by using his script-based/menu-driven approach. Still, it helps having some understanding of basic Linux and Linux administration when running a VPS, and there are some crucial tasks such as automating backups that need to be set up and managed separately from Centmin Mod (but there is plenty of information online about ways to manage backups).
CMM was a godsend. Trying to do all that myself resulted in too much time spent that I could be focusing on my business. As far as backups go, off site or another location is nice, but taking snapshots isn't a 3rd option to be overlooked either (I think it only costs me $3 extra per month too). Vultr makes that a breeze and with their $100 match $100 coupon, I moved from my $60/mo VPS to 3 instances on Vultr with a he'll of a lot more compute power for $35ish which essentially gives me like 6 months free, comparatively speaking.

CMM by @eva2000 helped me cut cPanel / WHM costs of $11/mo in addition, when I still needed to add 3rd party unsupported plugins to switch to nginx as a proxy and add mod_pagespeed. His LEMP stack with pagespeed performs so much better than having cPanel. He is also very responsive to inquiries to new people too. You can learn a lot from him and save some coin too.

As hosting goes, I looked at benchmarks and decided on Vultr because they had the best response times for their Tokyo location, which is closest to my end users. Eventually putting CloudFlare on top of that will fix it for everyone else, but, baby steps. Speed is excellent from here.
 
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