When setting up a forum, one of the big decisions is choosing between a VPS or shared hosting.

 

Shared hosting is budget-friendly and easy to manage, but it comes with resource limitations and potential slowdowns if other sites on the server are using too much power. Plus, there isn't much you can adjust without asking your hosting provider. On the other hand, a VPS gives you more control, better performance, and scalability - but at a higher cost and with more technical responsibility.

 

Which do you prefer for running a community? Do you stick with shared hosting for simplicity, or do you invest in a VPS for more power and flexibility?

My forums use a shared hosting plan. Paying for a VPS would be a waste of money at this time for me.

I've only used shared hosting, I don't have the funds to purchase a good VPS and I would need to actually learn how to manage things myself because self managing would be cheaper and honestly more fun in some cases.

Depending on the level of traffic your forum receives, a shared environment is good to start off with, however, once you start receiving a lot of traffic, a VPS or a reseller server is a wise investment.

 

You don’t want to experience lag issues nor connectivity issues due to your shared environment as your forum continues to grow.

 

I always prefer to go with managed server providers, but I do know somethings when it pertains to managing servers, but I’d rather leave everything else to the experts.😉

I've mostly used shared hosting services for my projects, and am currently using a shared hosting service (at Hawk Host) for my current project that's on the go.

 

I've paid for a VPS once in the past, when I was running a large forum that had hundreds of active members daily. The traffic we had was high, lots of guests, lots of search engine traffic, and we had a lot of things aside from the forum itself that required significant bandwidth - so the decision wasn't too difficult once we'd reached that stage.

 

A VPS was much more expensive back then (around 2012 or so) than it is now - if I recall I paid not far off $150 a month for our needs. That being said, the income of the site more than covered this and then some, so it wasn't a financially ruining investment, even though I was a teenager at the time. :P

I've mostly used shared hosting services for my projects, and am currently using a shared hosting service (at Hawk Host) for my current project that's on the go.

 

I've paid for a VPS once in the past, when I was running a large forum that had hundreds of active members daily. The traffic we had was high, lots of guests, lots of search engine traffic, and we had a lot of things aside from the forum itself that required significant bandwidth - so the decision wasn't too difficult once we'd reached that stage.

 

A VPS was much more expensive back then (around 2012 or so) than it is now - if I recall I paid not far off $150 a month for our needs. That being said, the income of the site more than covered this and then some, so it wasn't a financially ruining investment, even though I was a teenager at the time. :P

 

I’m glad prices are much better now. It makes expanding and growing easier for us as forum owners, instead of constantly worrying about costs like we did in the past. Plus, cloud offerings are a lot more accessible now compared to back then.

 

 

What provider did you use for your VPS? I had my dedicated server with Liquidweb.

Using shared hosting at the moment, not worth paying for a VPS at the moment

I used shared hosting in the beginning, found I felt I needed more power and root access.

 

Then I went to a vps, and found myself spending as much time managing the server to optimize for a forum and keeping it tight as I did just managing the forum. Speed was awesome.

 

Now I just rent a cloud instance. No server maintenance at all and is already tuned and tightened for forum software. Only can have one instance though and costs a monthly fee and my license is good as long as I pay the bill.

 

Looking back, I realize I have found that I really like the xfcloud system. All I need to do is maintain the forum. Speed is good at a smaller level, and scaling up as needed is easy. It is my p[reference now.

 

edit to add: I guess the cloud systems are in fact shared.

I used shared hosting in the beginning, found I felt I needed more power and root access.

 

Then I went to a vps, and found myself spending as much time managing the server to optimize for a forum and keeping it tight as I did just managing the forum. Speed was awesome.

 

Now I just rent a cloud instance. No server maintenance at all and is already tuned and tightened for forum software. Only can have one instance though and costs a monthly fee and my license is good as long as I pay the bill.

 

Looking back, I realize I have found that I really like the xfcloud system. All I need to do is maintain the forum. Speed is good at a smaller level, and scaling up as needed is easy. It is my p[reference now.

 

edit to add: I guess the cloud systems are in fact shared.

I’m a bit surprised you’d go “back” to shared/cloud when you’ve previously owned your own server. But I do understand the ease and decision.

 

That’s what I like doing though. Tinkering around with settings, commands, etc. to improve the server. In the future, I need to update the OS of mine, so that’ll give some downtime for an hour or two here. Just been thinking when I’d do it.

Yeah, this time around with this project I needed a turn-key solution. But I wouldn't align the xfcloud as a standard "shared server" as the server is specifically setup by xf and serves only their software. It isn't like I could install WP or something as a sidecar.

I know I mentioned above that I'm using shared hosting and that buying a VPS would be expensive. However, while reading up on Discourse's installation page they had a link to Digital Ocean and noticed that a droplet really isn't too expensive. So I signed up for Digital Ocean, I am still debating on if I'm really going to try a VPS though so I have yet to add my credit card info. I will come back to this thread if this changes.