Upgrading the forum

[Prince of Spires]

you're the best Daeron. Thanks!

[Noble Korhedron]

I'll prepare a migration to phpBB 3.2. I've just done the experiment on Dnet, and I can get it to work. This is a solid short term solution that doesn't exclude any long(er) term options.

For Discourse, my main concern is cost.

Full disclosure:
Right now, the hosting cost is 20$/mo to host 4 sites: Druchii.net, Ulthuan.net and Asrai (under Dnet DNS because the original DNS was lost) and a new site I'm launching.
After the upgrades, we can drop the extended support, lowering the bill to 15$/mo. I might even migrate another site to the VPS which should make the bill even more attractive to me. This is why I have no qualms paying the bill: I was willing to cover it for Dnet and the extra site I'm running, and ulthuan and Asrai are welcome to join the ride.

Theoretically, it should be possible to move the sites to a shared hosting formula, costing only 8$/mo for all the forums and whatever extra I add combined. I'm convinced this will not negatively impact the performance of the site, but I'd test this to make sure before making such a drastic move. This isn't a priority at the moment.

I should point out the current hosting plans offers unlimited transfer and disk space. Our sites currently take up a few GB of space, and around 1 GB of traffic per month per domain. This feels a bit high, so I'll monitor the logs in the coming months to see if this number is accurate. Getting accurate numbers is important to select a new host service that doesn't offer unlimited transfer.

Discourse hosting by its makers starts at 100$/mo. Communiteq promotes a 20$/mo offer, but by the looks of it that's only 1 site and it has a limit of 250k page views per month. We're well below that number but it's something to keep in mind.

I'm looking into AWS Lightsail. This is going straight to the cloud and doing a lot of the work manually. In theory it looks possible to set that up for around 5$/mo. I'm assuming that's per site. This is technically more complex, and I have no practical experience with this particular setup. I am AWS Certified though so I should have the skills to get it done.
However, there could be hidden costs and there is a limit on bandwidth. IE: it's unclear if there's a database needed for Discourse. If there is, that's another 15$/mo
If this could work for 5$/mo then this is an interesting move for Ulthuan but that makes me wonder why not everyone is jumping on this train. My guess is, there are more costs to it, or it's technically challenging.

I'm willing to cover the cost for Ulthuan while they ride on the same sub for Druchii.net. If Ulthuan moves to its own hosting plan, I'll assist in any way that I can technically, but I will expect someone else to pick up the bill after the migration is settled.

If you ever need help with it, @Daeron, I'm willing to chuck in $10 or so; even though this is my first time back here in A-G-E-S, this site has given me hours of entertaining discussions and other fun stuff...

[Morgen]

Thank you!

[Houdini]

Thank you @Daeron