You may want to try Digital Ocean. If you're a student with .edu mail address, you can register on GitHub student developer pack and receive lots of credits to spend on Amazon and Digital Ocean.

You can register to Google Cloud and get up to 300$ credits and try it out.

You can try Vultr.

In the end of the day it's all boils down to a nice VPS, if you come across installation errors you can post here again. Best of luck!

    Vultr recently added Plesk Onyx to their arsenal. It makes web admin related tasks fairly easier as their free tier (Plesk, not Vultr) will do just fine if you aren't registering/maintaining that many domains. You will still have to use SHH in order to install Flarum using composer, but it is well worth the smallest plan available on Vultr ($5 USD). I'm using Plesk Onyx as we speak with Vultr so it takes the pain out of having to constantly update and patch my server monthly and other miscellaneous tasks.

    DigitalOcean has some pretty good stuff too, but I still prefer Vultr as my VPS choice.

    Do stay away from shared hosting though, especially if they don't offer SSH access. Jailed SSH access isn't reliable either so be careful. Just spend $5 on either VPS service I mentioned and you should be good. The $5 plan is tailored to smaller community setups as well so please keep that in mind when choosing a plan that's right for you.

      Ralkage I didn't know that Vultr had Plesk. Is it the version that allows you to only have 3 mails, 3 domains?

      Edit1: oh I've just seen, it's try free for 30 days package, does it lock you out after 30 days or rate limits to 3?
      Edit2: wow everything on the site displays temporarily sold out

          duman correct, unlimited sub-domains too. One thing to keep in mind is that if you're going to use LetsEncrypt. the rate limit per domain is 20 add/removal of an SSL certificate in total so be careful or you'll end up having to wait a week like me to create a new cert for my main domain lol. Sub-domains are a different story though, you can have up to 1,000 sub-domains and they can all share the main SSL cert from the primary domain.

          Edit: The free tier should be free no matter what, 30 day trial only applies to the other tiers. But that's weird that all of their packages are sold out ?

            IMHO one of the big advantages of Flarum is that it runs nicely on a shared host with php support (and with SSH access). If one rents a VPS (and deals with all the additional system maintenance burden) you could also easily install Discourse or NodeBB.

            If you are based in the EU, OVH or Netcup provide good VPS and shared hosts that run Flarum nicely.

            duman DO blocks the port for edu accounts can u help me out regarding this? I'm not able to send any emails over flarum

              I have used many hosting services in the past and by far the best one to date is Liquid Web. They are absolutely flawless so far in my personal experiences and their support team are second to none. You may have seem me boast about the service in other discussions throughout the forum but I am yet to find a better service.

              Some people comment about price and what not but with Liquid Web, you definitely get what you pay for. Check them out and see for yourself. ?

                I can recommend Uberspace especially if you understand some German (the registration process right now comes in German although Google translate should be able to help). The documentation is available in English though.

                https://manual.uberspace.de/

                Uberspace right now only offers shared hosting but comes with a lot of freedom for those who are willing to work with a command line interface (no cPanel, Confixx or Plesk). Installing Flarum was easy, composer is installed by default, HTTPS is enforced by default, you don't need to care about that.

                You decide how much you want to pay, but minimum price should be 5 Euro per month. If your price doesn't match your strain on the server they will tell you. All in all very nice people and a professional approach.

                I am using https://scaleway.com . it is very development friendly with amazing prices (starts at 3 euro/month for 50 GB SSD VPS) .

                this is not a ad by the way (although I wish they had affiliate program ? )

                Cjcrux Yes I am; two for that matter. No problems whatsoever and the process was fluid. You won't be disappointed if you went with Liquid Web.

                    a year later

                    I build my own server and tweaking for private hosting usage (my clients only). It has many different unique setup comparing commercial webhosting.. If you interest, drop me a message 😄

                      4 years later

                      Consider Uberspace if you're comfortable with some German (Google Translate can assist during registration). They provide shared hosting without cPanel, Confixx, or Plesk, focusing on a command-line interface. Installing Flarum is easy with default Composer and enforced HTTPS. Pricing starts at 5 Euros per month, and they offer feedback if your usage doesn't align with your plan. Uberspace provides professional service with friendly support.

                      I have a VPS with Hetzner and I am very happy with it. I am running it on one of their Arm64 VPS's with a ton of RAM and vCPU's and the price is great. I have that paired with Laravel Forge which makes setting up daemons for Realtime and Redis much much easier.