Help Typedrawers find a new home
James Hultquist-Todd
Posts: 426
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!
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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.3
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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)1
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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)1 -
Maybe MyBB? Merge 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.
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oh you're right, I mixed that part up with OVH - similar providers in many ways. just a simple border I got wrongJens Kutilek said: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
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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.8
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I was about to post all what Georg just did, haha - the glyphsapp forum run on Discourse is great, and has a vanilla importer. James, keep us updated on what you need to make it happen
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Looks like Discourse might be the answer. I'll look into it.0
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