Help Typedrawers find a new home

Outages, increases in hosting fees, and random CSS changes abound. I think it's time to start looking at other options for forum hosting. If you are knowledgeable about such things I could use your help!

Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,526
    I mentioned this to our web developer, and he recommends Discourse as a platform for this kind of forum. Neither he nor I have experience porting existing content to a new platform, though.
  • jeremy tribby
    jeremy tribby Posts: 279
    I’m not up to date on forum software, but if self hosting is an option (can a hosted vanilla instance be migrated to a self hosted one?), there’s a host in germany called hetzner which is subsidized by the government and has very good pricing on powerful dedicated servers as a result. because enterprise customers require brand new hard drives, when they leave hetzner, those servers get wiped and auctioned starting around €30 a month with terabytes of storage and effectively unlimited traffic (it’s not really an auction, I’m not sure why they call it that). throw it behind cloudflare and then you get a CDN with snappy speeds around the world for free (and SSL pass through - no certificate management - too)
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 384
    It seems the open source Vanilla version was discontinued, so moving to a new host would also mean migrating the forum to a new software platform. That sounds like some heavy lifting ;)

    Hetzner is great, I've been hosting my stuff with them for nearly 20 years. (I don't think they are subsidized by the government though)
  • Maybe MyBBMerge System includes Vanilla.
    MyBB offers a merge system for easy merging of multiple forums from various different popular forum software, allowing an easy conversion process to MyBB.

  • jeremy tribby
    jeremy tribby Posts: 279
    It seems the open source Vanilla version was discontinued, so moving to a new host would also mean migrating the forum to a new software platform. That sounds like some heavy lifting ;)

    Hetzner is great, I've been hosting my stuff with them for nearly 20 years. (I don't think they are subsidized by the government though)a
    oh you're right, I mixed that part up with OVH - similar providers in many ways. just a simple border I got wrong :wink:
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 682
    We use discourse for our forum. And I’m very happy with it. We self host on a Hetzner server for less than 4 € per month. And I checked some time ago and there is an importer for vanilla forums.