Blomstra, development services & scalable managed Flarum

luceos

Hello 👋 everyone!

2021 will bring you an amazing managed Flarum solution! I have co-founded Blomstra to support the adoption of Flarum. Together with a couple of very amazing people, we want to extend the ecosystem with a reliable, trustworthy managed Flarum hosting partner. One of our goals is to donate to the Flarum Foundation in order to increase its short and long term sustainability.

Nurturing blooming communities.

Managed Flarum Hosting

As caretakers of the hosting side of your community, we remove the technical hardships of a Flarum forum. No need to run composer commands, secure your server, investigate extension compatibility or wait for upgrades by inactive maintainers - we have your back!

Benefits

🌤️ Scalable architecture guaranteeing top notch loading times.
🤼 Dedicated resources for each community: no overselling, highly available and secure.
⚙️ Upgrades and patches to Flarum and installed extensions are automatic and well tested.
🧑‍💻 Fast patch cycles on our platform are guaranteed by our continuous involvement to support maintainers by providing patches directly to extensions.
🌪️ File uploads (fof/upload) with CDN included (see Plans > Storage space).
📈 Getting a lot of attention? Your community won't be disabled when you go beyond your plan limits.
📧 Email notifications are send over our own managed email service for smaller communities, larger communities are recommended to use a dedicated email sending service.
🪐 Configurable domain or a subdomain on blomstra.community.
🔐 SSL enabled, fully secured.
💬 Expert email support by people who know Flarum by heart!

Plans

We're still working out the details of our plans. However, we already decided to base them on two major factors: active users and storage space.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Online users is a metric that we use based on the number of simultaneously online, unique people (not bots). These include logged in and guest users.
💾 Storage space is a metric relating to the amount of disk space used for uploading avatars and other files.

Extension Development

We provide extension development services as well. Check for more information on https://blomstra.net/development (more coming soon).

Stay up to date on our progress and news by subscribing to this discussion; click "follow"!

[deleted]

luceos you just know that anything @luceos is party to is going to be first class 👍

DursunCan

I wish you success for the project. I logged in with GitHub. I'm following.

Pollux

Two questions to start with:

a) Will forum maintainers be able to use their own extensions (packages folder)?

b) How will you handle the transition between versions of Flarum? It has to be expected, that forum admins have different ideas about the right time to switch according to the extensions they use. Will you offer different versions of Flarum concurrently and let forum admins choose between them?

luceos

Pollux a) Will forum maintainers be able to use their own extensions (packages folder)?

Not at first. We'll be looking at our options once we are happy with our basic offering. But already we have been considering what to do with that because obviously we do want to allow this.

Pollux b) How will you handle the transition between versions of Flarum? It has to be expected, that forum admins have different ideas about the right time to switch according to the extensions they use. Will you offer different versions of Flarum concurrently and let forum admins choose between them?

Our hosted flarum runs one set of versions at all times. We will assist (possibly even paying for or hiring) extension maintainers in patching their extensions for newer core versions. Our goal is to transition as fast as possible to newer versions. Right now we cannot allow clients to select the versions of extensions they'd like to use; we'll select the most recent and stable version per extension we offer and install/update to that.

Pollux

luceos Not at first. We'll be looking at our options once we are happy with our basic offering. But already we have been considering what to do with that because obviously we do want to allow this.

For me personally, customizing a forum is the most fun and I could never live without my own extend.php or even better my own extensions. But thinking about this freedom, I see potential problems arising when it comes to updates of Flarum. My own customisations (and even custom CSS) need to be tested before going life, and if you change the version of Flarum, my adaptations need to become effective at exactly the same time.

luceos

[deleted] thank you for your support Mark!

I'm hoping we can offer something of real value to the community.

[deleted]

luceos I know you will

luceos

Pollux But thinking about this freedom, I see potential problems arising when it comes to updates of Flarum. My own customisations (and even custom CSS) need to be tested before going life, and if you change the version of Flarum, my adaptations need to become effective at exactly the same time.

I am aware. And we are talking about solutions. We set up a pipeline to get quality and well tested releases out onto our platform. This process is flexible enough to allow the level of customization you speak of without losing the quality control. However, this won't be an option from the get-go.

tolgaaaltas what exactly are you talking about?

tolgaaaltas

hero-unit isn't translated correctly on this page in Turkish.

IKCU Atatürk Eğitim Ve Araştırma Hastanesi Bilgi İşlem Arıza Bildirim Uygulaması
This line specifically mentioned to a hospital in Turkey.

tolgaaaltas

luceos talking about Blomstra's Helpdesk page.

luceos

tolgaaaltas cool thanks for that.

meezaan

tolgaaaltas Can you please check again? Translations have been updated - if not, we'll raise an issue / PR in the Zammad repo accordingly. Thank you.

aaronlbpeterman

Evening, that's great news!

Are there any estimates of availability date?

luceos

aaronlbpeterman not right now, we're doing our best to reach the Seedling period as soon as we can.

MikeJones

Interested to see what the initial pricing looks like.

Also how will paid extensions work? If we bought something from extiverse?

luceos

MikeJones Interested to see what the initial pricing looks like.

We haven't decided on the final pricing yet. But our initial plan - without discounts - will be approximately $ 59 a month. With a yearly price of around 11 times that. This plan offers 20 active users and 10 GB disk storage, fully redundant, scalable and with excellent performance.

We are considering lower tiers later on this year, but it requires some work on our end and will probably make some things shared; queue runners and a database for example.

Also how will paid extensions work? If we bought something from extiverse?

We're looking into that 😉

arteteco

Hi, I registered for it using github and I had a 500 error. When I went back to the home page seems like it registered alright so not an issue, just to inform you.

Thanks!

luceos

arteteco that's odd, your registration seems successful anyhow though. I'll do some testing, but if anyone else runs into the same issue, please let me know 🙂

meetdilip thank you!

meetdilip

👏 👏

Nice venture. Much needed, that is all I can say now 🙂

tolgaaaltas

meezaan Still same. 🙁