Has any consideration been made about moving the MPCNC forum to Discourse? It’s really a fantastic piece of forum software that a handful of other open source communities are using (OctoPrint, MaslowCNC, HomeAssistant). They have a solid mobile app and the UI is really easy to use.
Have a look at the prices for 1M+ page views a month and over 30G of forum data alone.
?lol well is there a Patreon? I’ll pitch in 
I wonder what it’d end up costing to run it ourselves on AWS. Do you do all the deployment / infrastructure behind this bbpress forum?
It looks a little nicer but are there any specific features we are missing out on?
Not a ton of major discrete additional features, but it does just about everything better from my experience:
- Uses Markdown for text posts
- Can drag images/attachments straight into posts
- Renders youtube videos inline
- Mobile interface is excellent
- iPhone app with push notifications on replies / DMs
- Topic recommendation to reduce duplication
- Great search
- Great quoting/linking/attribution
- Default theme looks nice
Looks like Discourse’s distribution is Docker-based, and deployment looks very easy. I know a good bit about Docker, this would be pretty easy.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md
Maybe another bullet is that quite a few other communities are using it (especially in open source). So it will be potentially more familiar to new users.
I looked into it last night, docker and maintenance updates. We are on the bleeding edge of what my current hosting package can handle so I will keep looking into it at some point something has to change.
There is a bbpress importer as well.
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Yeah docker-based updates I imagine would make maintenance less than what you’re doing now. Neat to know about the bbpress importer, perhaps the migration wouldn’t be that hard!
Run it in a AWS Fargate environment with a RDS backend. Let it scale based on resource needs. Only cost would be usage and database size.
Any sort of ballpark price? What numbers do I need to know to figure out a price, bandwidth and database or memory/cpu?
Have you ever looked at https://www.greengeeks.com/ for your hosting? I have been with them for quite a few years and had hardly any problems with them, but do not do anything fancy with my site.
You should probably post your affiliate link. Those numbers are too good to be true, unlimited and $12/month…We are going to destroy them…
VPS and Dedicated are inline with my current company, Maybe I will call them. All the forum issues we have been having lately is an attack. My current host doesn’t seem to care and I have been blocking them manually. One closed blocked file hit 20k hits in a few hours, blocked it and now we are at 440k hits on another php file that I can not block. The current host seems to think I should worry about bing’s bot traffic more…because they seem to think the one with millions of hits isn’t as big a deal as bing’s bot crawling almost as much as google’s. There solution to the obvious attack…you should update your robots.txt file and specify slower crawling…because malicious bots follow the rules???
I don’t really have an affiliate link for them. If you mention me as the referral, I will probably get a discount on my next yearly fee.
Move the whole site over to the Shopify side, and just use reddit as the forums… Then I do not have to touch anything, as we grow the web side (site/forums/shop) gets more and more convoluted. Switching from paypal buttons, then to woocommerce, finally to shopify seemed expensive at first but dang did I save like 10 hours a week not dealing with updates and the issue they brought along.
If the site doubled right now (it has before twice) I don’t it would work anymore. With the price I pay shopify…they include hosting ( I need to look for specs and restrictions). Not sure they would be an easy/automatic way to move over though.
Using discorse seems like I might get in over my head really quickly. I used AWS for a little (CDN) while and I could never troubleshoot it when things went wrong so I just went to cloudflare…much easier for me.
Well shoot digital ocean seems to have good prices…https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ Amazon and google could be an option as well I suppose.
Current stats
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I did an image optimization on the entire 30G of pictures looks like it really helped the bandwidth! Those stats make digital ocean and discourse might actually be an option. I was joking about reddit but it would be nice not to deal with any of the back end stuff. I will keep digging.
The railcore guys have a forum, it’s almost never used, everybody uses discord. Which is a little funky, but seems to work. Though it’s more of a stream, so there’s not a lot of going back to certain posts.
Aws pricing calculators:
https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/pricing/
https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
Those can be used to ballpark costs. There would be a learning curve to setting it up, but you can get a free account and play with some of their products for up to a year before getting charged.
I run a single web node with a single RDS (database) backend. I also use glacier to back up nearly 4tb of data. My cost is ~$55/month to host my sites. My single web node is managed by an autoscaling group, so in the event the server locks up and dies, the ASG will spin up a new instance, mount the external website data (EBS) and then add it to the load balancer so it can start handling traffic again.
Most of that is over my head. I saw some write ups comparing Digital ocean to Amazon and Google. It was simplified down to the big guys are better and faster but you really need to know what you are doing and there is no support, since you are supposed to know what you are doing. I am seriously considering this all and there are a few choices but we’ll see. It would be a huge project but I think worth it in the end for everyone.