Help Typedrawers find a new home

James Hultquist-Todd
James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 426
in TypeDrawers Announcements
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: 3,551
    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: 284
    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: 386
    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)
  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 71
    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.

  • jeremy tribby
    jeremy tribby Posts: 284
    Jens 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
    oh you're right, I mixed that part up with OVH - similar providers in many ways. just a simple border I got wrong :wink:
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,511
    edited October 10
    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 :D
  • James Hultquist-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 426
    Looks like Discourse might be the answer. I'll look into it.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,511
    Any updates a month on? :)
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 683
    Contact me if you need a heads up.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,096
    I’m all for a hosting change. I can’t access the forum through my home internet any more, for several months now.
  • adamwhite
    adamwhite Posts: 52
    How about just using a custom Discord server? Forums are quite outdated.

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