XenForo Cloud discussion

[alternadiv]

In the interests of testing, I valiantly volunteered my services and moved my existing XF site to XFC.

The whole process took a matter of minutes with the longest part of it being taking and uploading the backups.
DNS propagation was complete within 5 minutes - total downtime was less than an hour.
With a faster connection it would have been minutes.

My 10 year old XF site is now running on XFC

Clip The Apex

Formula One overtaking data, statistics, and analysis from 1981 to present day

cliptheapex.com

 

[Paul B]

You have browser or local DNS cache issues.

DNS has fully propagated.

 

[alternadiv]

You have browser or local DNS cache issues.

DNS has fully propagated.

Yea, it’s working now

 

[Ranger375]

Fwiw, XF cloud just allowed me to resurrect my dead website to the cloud after being down for nearly two years. They quickly migrated my data from an old backup and I’m using a custom domain. There are a few things I need to figure out and get used to after going from a dedicated server (domain emails, storage, and such) but the experience so far has been amazing and suits my needs at the time.

 

[eva2000]

Fwiw, XF cloud just allowed me to resurrect my dead website to the cloud after being down for nearly two years. They quickly migrated my data from an old backup and I’m using a custom domain. There are a few things I need to figure out and get used to after going from a dedicated server (domain emails, storage, and such) but the experience so far has been amazing and suits my needs at the time.

Interesting, XF could also pivot this cloud hosting service for external backup/cloning service too for folks who want to maintain a cloned copy of their live forums on XF cloud for whatever purpose i.e. staging testing or development work

 

[MapleOne]

Fwiw, XF cloud just allowed me to resurrect my dead website to the cloud after being down for nearly two years. They quickly migrated my data from an old backup and I’m using a custom domain. There are a few things I need to figure out and get used to after going from a dedicated server (domain emails, storage, and such) but the experience so far has been amazing and suits my needs at the time.

I use google domains and setting up email was relatively easy.

You cannot have email on cloud for your domain unless you host it somewhere else.
For me I use google domains so it was easy to hook in my gmail account and use it for the forum addresses.

 

[MapleOne]

In the interests of testing, I valiantly volunteered my services and moved my existing XF site to XFC.

The whole process took a matter of minutes with the longest part of it being taking and uploading the backups.
DNS propagation was complete within 5 minutes.

Total downtime was less than an hour.
With a faster connection it would have been minutes.

My 10 year old XF site is now running on XFC

Clip The Apex

Formula One overtaking data, statistics, and analysis from 1981 to present day

cliptheapex.com

The twitter list on the right side looks fantastic, what addon is that?

 

[Paul B]

It's just a regular Twitter widget, in an XF widget.

<div class="block">
    <div class="block-container">
        <a class="twitter-timeline" data-height="600" data-link-color="#FF9900" href="https://twitter.com/ClipTheApex/lists/motorsport?ref_src=dhge8dse">Tweets loading ...</a> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    </div>
</div>

 

[Old Nick]

The logo is just incredible @Brogan !!
Who is the genius graphic designer you hired ?

 

[Wildcat Media]

The price currently starts at $60 though may be more depending on specific requirements and complexity.

If any existing XF customers are interested, please feel free to Contact us and we can provide more details and discuss requirements.

In the future, I may be in touch for a "big board" forum. We are at a point at our current host where we may have to get our hardware upgraded (which will cost a bit) , or move to another hosting company if the cost at our current host is too high. It's hard to leave a host after 18 years but it might be necessary.

 

[MapleOne]

In the future, I may be in touch for a "big board" forum. We are at a point at our current host where we may have to get our hardware upgraded (which will cost a bit) , or move to another hosting company if the cost at our current host is too high. It's hard to leave a host after 18 years but it might be necessary.

Keep in mind a dedicated server can run many sites and host email.

I have many sites and also have a dedicated server.
I love xenforo cloud but if you run numerous sites the dedicated server will start too look attractive.
In fact even shared hosting looks attractive if you run multiple sites.

For a single instance forum xenforo cloud is probably the best assuming you know how to host your email.

I am running many sites including some online stores doing over 2 million in sales annually. Once you have your server costs for everything you add is minimal.

So Xenforo cloud is the perfect tool for beginners and people that want a forum that just runs. For more complex setups and multiple sites nothing beats a dedicated server.

Next step for Xenforo might be dedicated servers with built in Xenforo.
I know some websites will not be able to operate unless they have file access.

 

[Wildcat Media]

We've had a dedicated server for 18 years, and I've been in this for 25+ years now. Time to move on. All the other sites I manage are cloud hosted elsewhere, and with those I can add more resources on the fly, as needed. We need that with big boards as well, since to add memory or CPU on a dedicated server is impossible without an expensive change of hardware or moving up to a more expensive account that is overkill for our needs. I don't know if the new XF Cloud service will offer any of what we need in the future, which is why we have to ask when the time comes.

 

[tonmo]

I did not think my extraordinarily complex legacy systems (for a 20+ year old forum) could be migrated so cleanly to XF Cloud. Hats off to this team for a job well done with this product and service. There were a couple hiccups for sure (more from me), but all deftly and ably navigated by this team.

What it was:

• AWS hosted forum using centminmod, and also using the S3 external storage config for attachments / images
• fronted by cloudflare
• zoho for email (personal, bounce and noreply)

What it is:

• XF Cloud hosted
• fronted by cloudflare
• cloudflare beta for inbound personal email (and since XF cloud handles bounces & noreply inherently, that's all I need)

I'm spending less, I've dropped two 3rd parties (AWS and zoho), and I've deeply simplified everything, without sacrificing anything. In fact performance seems to be better all-around. This is probably the best thing released by XF since 2.x, or perhaps ever.

 

[RobinHood]

One thing that bugs me a little bit about the pricing page is the fact that standard is listed first, then business, then something smaller below the fold.

I get that you want to try and upsell the standard and business tiers, but the fact that the budget option is below the fold on a line of its own makes it harder to compare all the options and even see that there's a budget option at all if you don't bother to scroll below the fold assuming that the cheapest option would be first.

Personally I think it should be all three on the same row, from budget to business, let the users decide based on spec and value. Maybe all 4 on the same row for wide screen. Enterprise can have it's own line if necessary. But the easier it is to compare plans on the same row line for line, the better I think,

 

[beerForo]

I will add my own feedback as well. I forgot the actual bulk discounts and was looking at a 3rd license. I forgot if it was discounted. Took a hell of time finding the info. It's not on the license page, only after you click to assemble it, and near the footer. I understand the detailed info should not be on the main page, but at least a mention of (Bulk discounts available) next to the license price would help XF.

 

[RobinHood]

Ughh, I've just had to abandon my plan to shift my entire personal computing setup to XFC. My disappointment is immeasurable.

 

[beerForo]

(Bulk discounts available)

With a link, I meant. To find easily.

 

[Mr. Jinx]

I'd like to share another successful migration to Xenforo Cloud:

Provider Forum (powered by XF Cloud)

We recently converted an existing XF community into a new site with fresh design. The old site was using the default XF layout with some tweaks. The new site has a custom theme designed by @Russ. I can say the whole process to get where we are now with Russ was very pleasant. As I didn't know...

xenforo.com

This forum has a long history, started more than 20 years ago with YaBB SE
After multiple software conversion like SMF and vBulletin, different site names and switching hosting providers, we are now running Xenforo Cloud.

Why?
I have been running my own servers for a very long time. Shared hosting, dedicated, VPS, I have used it all.
The latest server was a very fast VPS from UpCloud. At some point, I didn't want to spent any more time keeping the server itself up-to-date and secure + making good backups. It's not that much work, but it sure is a responsibility and you have to stay up to date. Going to a managed solution was the next step for me.

About the migration
The migration was managed by Xenforo, so it was very easy for me this time. I just had to provide a backup of my community, and that's about it.
The whole process didn't take much longer than just one hour. After that we did some tests. Some things that didn't work as expected were resolved immediately by Xenforo. Once all was good, we made a DNS change and the community was back online.
Our users didn't notice any difference, which is a good sign.

Performance
Although I didn't migrate specifically for better performance, I was happily surprised by the results.
As stated earlier, I was running a very fast VPS from UpCloud, running Nginx and all optimizations I know of like Redis cache, Elasticsearch and much more were implemented.

Take a look at this graph:

What you see here is the time it takes for the server to generate the forum index, and then download this file. So all external factors and rendering excluded.

At 11:00am (CEST), we started the migration.
At 12:30am (CEST), the DNS change was ready and we put the new forum out of maintenance

As you can see, the page generation latency has been improved dramatically.
For me, this was a big surprise as I thought my site was already running full speed. Let's hope they can keep up with this great performance.
So far, we are totally happy with this move!

 

[Lee]

@Chris D - if I sign up for a second cloud account and use a xenForo domain, can I change to a custom domain later? I have an idea for a community related to my job and would like to toy with the idea while I think of a name.

 

[Kier]

@

@Chris D - if I sign up for a second cloud account and use a xenForo domain, can I change to a custom domain later? I have an idea for a community related to my job and would like to toy with the idea while I think of a name.

Yes, while your chosen community.forum or xenforo.cloud domain is immutable, you can switch to a custom domain at any time you like (as many times as you like)