Blomstra, development services & scalable managed Flarum

MikeJones

Awesome work as always!

luceos

Holiday Season

The holiday season 🎄 and a new year 🎆 is upon us!
We hope that all of you are able to warm your heart, be inspired and recharge.

And, although we had a very turbulent year at Blomstra with its inception, switching cloud providers twice and some downtime, we seriously made great progress 📈. The hosting platform is operating smoothly and many lines of code for our development clients are spewed out daily.

Holiday 25

To celebrate we survived our first year 😁 and to celebrate the holidays we decided to add an entry-level subscription plan for startup and growing communities alike. Registrations for this plan are only available until December 31st, but the plan itself will continue until either upgraded or cancelled. This plan is available to new and existing customers.

The Holiday 25 plan is available at just € 22,90 per month. This includes:

a soft limit of 25 online users (guests and members online at the same time and excluding bots).
5 GB of online storage for avatars and file uploads (should you choose to enable it).
all Blomstra premium extensions free of charge.
month to month payment, cancel anytime, no contract.
hosted on a scalable, environment friendly, modern hosting environment.
and many more benefits, see https://blomstra.net/hosting for all the details.

So what does this "online users" mean? If you haven't seen more than 25 people on your community at the same time ("realtime") in a tracking tool like Analytics, then you will be just fine. Should you reach that number permanently or you are getting double that amount for a short period, we won't turn the site off. We'll just get in touch with you to provide you with some options to better spread your visitors or to suggest an upgrade.

If you have any questions feel free to let me know here, on Discord luceos#0001 or via email daniel@blomstra.net.

💝 Be safe!

website: https://blomstra.net
hosting: https://blomstra.net/hosting
development: https://blomstra.net/development
our extensions: https://extiverse.com/team/blomstra

luceos

We are now also able to provide custom designs, like a reskin, of your Flarum community. We'll be adding examples for that soon.

See https://blomstra.net, the updated home page describes the community journey we can provide to our clients.

PS the limited time offer is still available

luceos Holiday 25

volkan28

As a Blomstra customer, I highly recommend using the service. The team is extremely professional and very capable to solve the issues. We have 30K+ daily user, we have been using the service for 3 months and very happy to use the Blomstra.

hrvoje_hr

volkan28 We have 30K+ daily user,

That's impressive! Can you share the link? I would like to see a Flarum forum of that size.

luceos

volkan28 We have 30K+ daily user

And your community just peaked without any issue to almost 2000 online users - real people pretty much all online at the same time - 🎆 (excluding bots), which is twice the amount of the plan! Woohoo!

🟨 number of guests plus members
🟥 plan limit
🟪 bots

And the average response times went up for a less than a minute while more capacity was booted up to handle with the sudden influx of traffic.

🟦 response times of more than half of all visitors

Disclaimer. This is a snapshot. Now that are platform has become stable, we'll be continuously be improving its automated scaling and performance.

volkan28

hrvoje_hr forum.mutluanneleriz.com

luceos

Seems that adding a subscription that only allows for a monthly plan bricked the order process. It's now fixed though, sorry for the inconvenience and thank you @RishitKedia for reporting it 💗

volkan28

luceos And your community just peaked without any issue to almost 2000 online users - real people pretty much all online at the same time - 🎆 (excluding bots), which is twice the amount of the plan! Woohoo!

The power of mobile notification🙂

Hari

luceos my i know the server configuration for this kind of community.

4GB ram
2 vCPUs

8GB ram
4 vCPUs

16GB ram
8 vCPUs

which one would you prefer? if it is hosted on an auto resized platform I want you to give a random guess

luceos

luceos almost 2000 online users

Hari this community came from a 32 vCPU digital ocean droplet, where they had many crashes during peak hours. The Blomstra stack runs on kubernetes, which auto scales with demand, which means new virtual machines are added whenever there's a need to scale up. These virtual machines are then destroyed when this demand no longer exists. This makes our solution better for the environment than running a bare metal or virtual machine.

Hari

luceos i have a question, if it is off-topic do split this.

why do we need such a huge number of servers, why can't flarum make a static version of discussions which are older than a few months because most of them are just read by google-search users so we can decrease the load on the server by delivering a static version to them.

most of the active users are in newly created discussions right they do all these activities in new discussions.
of course, a few users may do activities like liking old posts i don't think handling it will be difficult in static pages

i am not into development but just want to know is that possible? these days i am quite thinking in go serverless way

luceos

Less than a day after the release of Flarum v1.2, the Blomstra stack has upgraded to that version.

Some of the things that happened in the past month.

We have further fine-tuned our hosting infrastructure, making it extremely resilient against sudden bursts of activity and reducing unnecessary resource utilization (better for the environment).
We have worked with our clients to extend the ecosystem with huge improvements like bugfixes and new features, just browse through the Posts tab of my colleague @IanM to see what I mean 😍
We have started work on use case balloons and dedicated pages to show off the happiness of our clients in what we do, to give you an idea:

@Fantomen of hockeybulletin.se has been one of our first hosted Flarum customers. He has been ridiculously awesome to provide us with some great feedback and write our ever first use case. Here's an excerpt of what he says about the hosting services Blomstra provides:

The problem

[...] there was a need to have a server infrastructure that would be able to scale during peak hours (e.g. during a game). I initially tried to throw more money at the server I hosted the forums on but without competence on how to properly optimize the instance it did not really matter. The forums went from about 20 concurrent users during the day to peaking at 300 concurrent users making the forums crash and lag out.

The solution

I have seen the names involved in [Blomstra] involved in the core development of Flarum and working with someone whom I know 1) knows the platform very well and 2) very actively still contributing to the development of it sounded like a perfect fit. The Blomstra team also offers scalable solutions which is something that is a perfect match for me with my inconsistent user surges.

The bonus

Blomstra has a range of fantastic in-house built extensions such as the payments extension. This made it possible for me to integrate donations from members directly on the forums. The real-time plugin also works very well. The support and interaction from the team have been fantastic, always reachable and quickly resolving issues, even though the time is past business-hours.

The full use case will be up somewhere this quarter 😉

luceos

luceos The full use case will be up somewhere this quarter

Seems I got to it faster than I thought possible, first version is now up: https://blomstra.net/use-case/hockeybulletin.se

What do you think?

luceos

🥚 25% Seedling 50 Easter discount

Use promotion code `2022EASTER` with the Seedling 50 plan when creating your community on our hosting platform to get a 🚀 discount of 25% for the first 3 months!

🧩 Our hosting platform includes all current and future Blomstra Premium extensions for free.
🌻 The Seedling 50 plan suffices for every small and most medium communities.
💾 10 GB disk space & CDN included in the Seedling 50 plan.
😅 No hard limits that disable your community when you attract attention.
🔠 Over 120 extensions pre-installed and new ones added on request and after quality control.

Check all details of this hosting plan on https://blomstra.net/hosting, you can also find my contact details at the bottom of the page should you have any questions.
On Discord? Ping me luceos#0001.

Hari

luceos CDN

Is flarum CDN compatible? Or it is about image CDN?

How can I use my own CDN like stackpath or CF

luceos

A new update for another month!

@volkan28 decided to trust us with his second community forum.mutlubebekleriz.com 🙏.
Next to 🤰 happy moms, 👶 happy kids can be social together on a Flarum community that loads in around 300 milliseconds!

Some other boring news:

❤️‍🔥 This year over 30% of all client development has been towards open source contributions, resembling € 1000 on average each month. And that doesn't even include the hard work @IanM put into the @FriendsOfFlarum extensions lately 😍 !
🚀 Our hosting platform has cut loading times by 20% due to performance optimizations.
👩‍🚀 We plan to upgrade our platform to Flarum v1.3 next week.

luceos

May passed by, a quick 👋 from my end before the weekend:

❤️‍🔥 This month we spent a whopping 76% of all client development on open source! Almost 55 hours in total!
🌲 We have been able to reduce the reserved capacity we run for our platform by almost 2/3 without sacrificing performance! As such we have cut our ecological footprint. This isn't very exciting at the scale we operate now, but means the world - 😉 - in the long run.

luceos

July, 🥏 time flies!

Another quick recap of what has happened at our non-existent, remote-only HQ 🏛️

🧑‍💻 We are overjoyed to have welcomed @SychO into our team. Hearing about his efforts to find employment after college, we offered Sami a position to consider working solely on Flarum as soon as he received his degree. Yesterday all paperwork got signed and next Monday will be his first ever "office" day 🥳 !
❤️‍🔥 In June we spent a whopping 79% of our work on open source! This includes contributions to:
- FoF Follow Tags
- FoF Follow Users
- Sycho Profile Cover
- FoF Sitemap
- Core reusable tag selection component
- Flarum subscriptions
- Digest
- And, and .. a ton more!
🚀 We have upgraded our platform to Flarum v1.4 in 16 hours and 29 minutes. @IanM gained the achievement "release hunter" for that 😁
⛅ Since June 3rd we upgraded our platform 22 times and since switching to Azure on September 7th 2021 we had no downtime caused by our hosting provider 🙏
🔁 We have made some great progress on the (websocket) Realtime extension which we're hoping to make available soon. Initially this will only with a premium plan that includes installation support and eventually we're hoping to dual license it so that it can be installed with community support. Two things still have to be cleared up before we make the extension available with a plan to everyone.
🦜 Have you seen the email conversations extension? It's available for review under a beta release. It allows using email to continue your conversations inside Flarum. We have decided to make the implementation generic enough for other adapters to work with it as well, with a Slack being worked on.
🧩 Some other extensions we published for everyone to use:
- Sign in with Slack: https://extiverse.com/extension/blomstra/oauth-slack
- Usercard Stats: https://extiverse.com/extension/blomstra/usercard-stats
- Sign in with Apple: https://extiverse.com/extension/blomstra/oauth-apple

🍃 New here and curious why I promote & represent this company? Read about all that on the Blomstra About page: https://blomstra.net/about. Feel free to check our services for managed hosting and development!

💖 Thanks for following!

ctml

luceos Digest

Caught my attention.. wasn't aware this existed. Wondering if there is any documentation on this? Maybe a discuss thread, or is that planned once it's matured a bit more?

IanM

ctml Caught my attention.. wasn't aware this existed. Wondering if there is any documentation on this? Maybe a discuss thread, or is that planned once it's matured a bit more?

It's still in beta at the moment, with very little documentation yet written 🙈

You can take a look at the closed PR's so far (many of which have screenshots, etc) here, which will give you a reasonable idea of where we are going with it.

If you wish to take it for a spin, composer require blomstra/digest:"@beta" will do the trick.

Once we're out of beta, we will of course officially announce the extension here on Discuss 🙂

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