New hosting & forum dev

Hey community, the time has come to upgrade/move hosts - Does anyone have any affordable hosting options
Currently need - 100GB Storage (for now) | 250GB Bandwidth per month with a minimum page count of more than 5 million (viewed and not viewed (spiders))


Looked at https://www.kualo.com/webhosting/business-web-hosting, but I'm just blindly googling at this point.

Also need someone that is proficient with ZenForo forums to do the troubleshooting when needed.

I can vouche for Netcup. I've been with them for years, still am and haven't had any issues. They are a well backed hosting provider if you look up which other organizations partner with them and stand behind them.

I'd suggest to get a linux VM over a web-hosting plan, as you'd have much more flexibility and actually guranteed ressources.

Oberfail said:

I can vouche for Netcup. I've been with them for years, still am and haven't had any issues. They are a well backed hosting provider if you look up which other organizations partner with them and stand behind them.

I'd suggest to get a linux VM over a web-hosting plan, as you'd have much more flexibility and actually guranteed ressources.

netcup GmbH - Root Server

Your partner for web hosting, root server, managed server, domains, SSL certificates and more.

www.netcup.eu

Spoiler: For transparency

If you decide to go with them, i as a normal customer can give you a wide variety of voucher coupons. Which gives you some cheaper prices and i'll get 10% of what you pay them with no draw-back for either of us.

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Thanks for that buddy, I'll look into it, the price looks good will have to research the rest cause even tho i'm a computer tech, I know squat about servers/hosting stuffs will reach out for those codes if I run with it!!!

Hi there Boss,

what about a bare metal (a physical server)? you have full control, super-easy to install and maintain. It's over 10 years I use their services, for both Windows and Linux services.

For 22.99€/month you get a Xeon 4-core, 32GB RAM, 2x 2TB disk, illimited traffic and a public IP. Up to 16 extra IP addresses for a 2€ activation fee. Super-fast machines.

https://www.soyoustart.com/ie/essential-servers/

For the more powerful range: OVH site.
For less powerfull range: Kimsufi site.

Easy, also, to create secondary machines by simply cloning the VM (even across different servers).



I get the XenCenter version so I can install many VMs on it (both Linux and Windows VM).

@hbpowerwall What are the current system stats that the site is running on?? For instance, most of these plans will vary with how many cores are available to the site. If the current system using 4 cores, then you can get away with buying into that plan. But if it's using more than that, then you don't want to go with less as it has a great potential to slowing the site down, plus when doing management connections.
Same goes for ram.

Korishan said:

@hbpowerwall What are the current system stats that the site is running on?? For instance, most of these plans will vary with how many cores are available to the site. If the current system using 4 cores, then you can get away with buying into that plan. But if it's using more than that, then you don't want to go with less as it has a great potential to slowing the site down, plus when doing management connections.
Same goes for ram.

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I can tell you that with a bare-metal server you can handle a looooooot of users (and pages and visits). Even when installing a couple of VMs on the server, for easy of maintanance, performance can easily handle million of users per month.

For e.g. a possible, quite typical, configuration could be:
Baremetal Server with ESXi or Xen Center installed (I prefer the latter); ESXi or XenCenter can be chosen at order time and will be autoinstalled. Having one of these hypervisors systems gives you a good resource management and will let you create VMs on-the-fly from the control panel.
1) VM n.1 Linux web server (with forum application); 8GB RAM;
2) VM n.2 Linux database server (I suppose it uses MySql/MariaDB); 16GB RAM;
3) VM n.3 Linux Monitoring server (just to keep all parameters under control); 4GB RAM;
4) VM n.4 Linux automatic backup server (a bunch of script to manage backups); 512MB or 1GB RAM.

VMs n.3 and 4 are optional but nice to have.

VPS services are usually limited and stay at a lower level on the performance side.

As I don't do anything with the forum other than bought the domain name Mike has done everything else - I basically need a new Mike! Or a service that is plug n play. As long as the new server is able to run Zenforo and is managed from a security update standpoint I think that is all I need for now. However have plans to eventually grow this into a go-to market place for all things in the Secondlife battery space.

@hbpowerwall I can support the forum management, it doesn't cost me much effort. Had a quick look at XenForo, I can prepare a draft plan for how I would handle the migration and the new server setup, keeping in mind future evolutions and security. I managed migration for many big sites in the past with a scheduled minimum offline time. Obviously we make a test setup first to see if everything works.

While we're talking about the site hosting - who pays for the site/hosting? It's been such a blessing for me personally and I've often wondered who to thank.

OffGridInTheCity said:

While we're talking about the site hosting - who pays for the site/hosting? It's been such a blessing for me personally and I've often wondered who to thank.

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Mike (LithiumSolar) is 100% responsible for the forum in its current form after my first failed efforts. Mike has hosted, maintained & supported everything on the back end.. Without his help and ethical approach (vetoed many of my ideas lol) Forum would have died early on and I would have accepted one of the many offers to buy it. All I do it maintain the domain names & spend a few hours a day reading every other post & checking every new member for IP addresses, Multiple accounts, Spam posts, Back Link advertising etc.

Kori & Daniel have been priceless in their efforts to maintain the front end so to speak.

Well, I'm online a good portion of the day, so might as well toss a few minutes every so often at the forum to help keep things tidy