I have a questions before I use Flarum professionally

Hobbyist

Hey, Flarum Community!

I want to use this forum software professionally. I have big plans and Flarum will be the hub of my new business but I have a few questions that hopefully some resourceful people can answer.

For starters, I have about 11 years of experience using forums, including managing one with over 10,000 daily members. But! - I've never used Flarum before. I'm unfamiliar with the code and am just getting started with understanding the ecosystem. I'm certainly going to do some hiring, but I'd love to answer some of the questions I have before getting started.

What are your recommended server requirements for all these extensions? I spent hours checking out Extiverse and recorded at least 30 or 40 different tools I'd like for my site. Besides the minimum installation numbers, what should I be relying on considering I'll eventually have dozens more, web traffic and other data stored.

Referrals for Developers would be sweet. Do you have a few people worthy of a bookmark? I'd be interested in someone already familiar with Flarum that is also a full-stack dev. A few creative theme designers would also be a huge plus.

If just a few people could leave me some answers and even a few extra tips about the software or it's network of members it would be very helpful and I would be more than grateful.

-off air

Hari

Hobbyist What are your recommended server requirements for all these extensions?

there are many extensions few of them are listed here and I believe these are gems https://blomstra.net/product/extensions

Hobbyist Besides the minimum installation numbers, what should I be relying on considering I'll eventually have dozens more, web traffic and other data stored.

You should go through this discussion where you will find a few realtime stress tests (these are not official but let us assume those are the best benchmark tests which are available out there) https://discuss.flarum.org/d/25875-blomstra-development-services-scalable-managed-flarum/107

Hobbyist Referrals for Developers would be sweet.

Devs who are listed here at https://blomstra.net/company/about are the avengers and all other developers are superheroes.
alternatively, regarding development feel free to start a discussion under the service tag if someone is interested they will contact you

Hobbyist I have big plans and Flarum will be the hub of my new business

I wish you all the best, do spend at least 30days with any forum software before proceeding further. dating is always fun and creates scope to know more about the other person/software 😉

Valeyard

Hobbyist What are your recommended server requirements for all these extensions? I spent hours checking out Extiverse and recorded at least 30 or 40 different tools I'd like for my site. Besides the minimum installation numbers, what should I be relying on considering I'll eventually have dozens more, web traffic and other data stored.

1GB of RAM should be plenty to be honest for most forums. But if you're planning a large forum just select a host that allows you to scale-up your VPS as needed.

The main thing that will eat up server resources isn't Flarum, but the mail server if you set one up and want to have mailboxes and want POP3 and IMAP access. Personally I think that's a waste of resources, all I would do is set up the SMTP relay with the proper authentication and SRS for email forwarding (admin@yourdomain.com > youremail@gmail.com). Other people will use 3rd-party SMTP relays like MailChannels.

PHP8 is way more efficient than PHP3-5 which is probably what your older forums were running on? So the server requirements should be lower than if you were running a legacy forum on pre-PHP8.

Speaking of PHP you should install just about every extension as Flarum and its plugins will be wanting a lot of them, the core requirements are here.

Many extensions will become abandoned (some already are) so try and start with FoF extensions first, and try not to rely on 3rd-party ones (install 3rd party ones as nice to have features which you could live without rather than essential ones). The Rich Text editor is an obvious exception to that rule.

Sanguine

Hobbyist server costs are typically a fraction of labor costs so I wouldn’t bother about server requirements and just get the biggest one