Link Robins — Flarum Resources

KBExit

Hello Flarum Community!

I'm Karl Bullock, founder of Link Robins — a disabled Marine Corps Veteran and long-time fan of this ecosystem. Some of you know Link Robins from our managed Flarum hosting days. A quick update on that first, then what I'm building now.

We no longer offer managed Flarum hosting. I retired the hosting product in mid-2026 to focus on what forum owners kept actually asking me for: tools and hands-on help for the forum you already run — wherever you run it. Everything below works with any Flarum, hosted anywhere.

📈 Free Uptime Monitoring & Status Pages

Free, forever — no credit card, no expiry, for any site (not just Flarum).

Uptime monitoring: response times, uptime percentages, SSL validity and domain expiry, checked every minute. HTTP, TCP and heartbeat (cron-style) monitors.
Incident alerts via email, webhooks, Discord, Slack, Teams, Telegram and more.
Status pages on your own domain — status.yourdomain.com with one CNAME, SSL automatic.

Our own infrastructure is monitored by the same product, publicly: https://linkrobins.com/status/uptime

🤖 Managed MCP — connect your AI to your forum

Give Claude (or any MCP-capable AI) real access to your Flarum: search discussions, draft replies, moderate, analyze — through a proper API, not screen-scraping.

Self-hosting it is free and open source: mcp-for-flarum.
Managed MCP is $49/year: I run the endpoint, keep it updated and secured, you paste one URL into your AI client. Read-only mode available if you want AI eyes but not AI hands.

⚡ Warble — realtime for your Flarum, as a pasted key

Live posts, typing indicators and instant notifications normally mean running your own websocket daemon next to PHP. Warble replaces that with a connection: install the flarum-warble extension, paste your setup key, done. Your forum's realtime runs on dedicated infrastructure I operate, from $49/year. (Prefer to self-host? The stock flarum/realtime daemon is exactly the right tool — Warble is for owners who don't want to run one.)

🧪 Free Dev Sandboxes

Throwaway Flarum instances for extension developers and the curious: a real Flarum 2.0 with the Extension Manager, your choice of MariaDB, MySQL, Postgres or SQLite, gone in 4 hours. Free — spin one up at https://linkrobins.com/sandbox. Longer-lived prepaid sandboxes available for serious extension work.

🏆 Flarum Rankings

A free public directory of Flarum communities, ranked by real activity read from each forum's own public API — updated continuously: https://linkrobins.com/rankings. Submissions welcome.

I also write about running Flarum in production — hosting pitfalls, performance, honest tooling comparisons — on the blog, with a newsletter that goes with it.

Everything runs on 100% US-based infrastructure, and when you reach out you always talk to me — one person, one point of contact.

Questions welcome here, or come say hi on our forum.

— Karl

ernestdefoe

KBExit pretty awesome function.

navindra

Wow. Well, done! 👍

~~The pricing is basically at-cost, as far as I can tell. I would guess that it's near impossible for another business to beat those prices or sustain them in the long run. 👏~~ Edit: Crossed out my comment since the pricing is now updated to be sustainable.

Good luck!

KBExit

navindra thanks! The biggest factor from surveying individuals were that they had no experience running servers and don't wish for that headache and at the same time, they want some thing affordable. I figured my pricing for introductory is great and if they need more resources, I can discuss upgrades or refer them out / assist them in spinning up their own instance.
I want to do this out of good faith of the community and at the same time, protect myself from abuse. This is why I manually spin the instances up after payment and allow 14 days free trial. If something isn't right, customers are free to leave 🙂 Additionally, I'm not afraid to say no if something would hinder my resources or my reputation as well.
Support is also a big factor here. I'll answer everything that's thrown at me, and if there's an issue, I can easily take the logs and reach out to the community here, who have proven helpful for the best interest of running the core software.

ernestdefoe

KBExit Update #2: I am offering Flarum hosting including REDIS right out of the bat at $60 / mo and unlimited storage (Fair Use). 14 days free trial.

$60 a month or $60 a year? Just asking because of what your website says.

KBExit

ernestdefoe Sorry about that! 60 / year!
Thank you for catching that!

Edit, you'll get the new rate vs what I originally quoted you 🙂

ernestdefoe

KBExit well I noticed in the original post you had $60 a year but in the post I quoted you said month I just wanted to make sure.

KBExit

ernestdefoe I appreciate it! Not enough Coca Cola in my system lol

ernestdefoe

KBExit I knew I liked you. Coke all the way.

ernestdefoe

I have been trying out the service offered by @KBExit since he pretty much started out and to me it's a bridge between what FreeFlarum offers (if you outgrow their service) and the Commercial Flarum hosting provided by Flarum. The fact that this service has Redis out of the box and support for Realtime if you have purchased a license for it makes this service amazing. I highly recommend the service offered by Karl. The fact you can also use the Flarum Extension Manager so you can install extensions yourself is a plus in my book. Karl goes above and beyond to make sure things are running smoothly and the one on one support is amazing.

KBExit

ernestdefoe wanted to say thank you again since the posts split off. I am grateful that you gave me a chance when I first launched and stuck by with me through it all. I am so glad to have you as a client 🙂

KBExit

Valkey + Horizon Support

So thankful for @IanM and his discussion with me to fix an issue for a client AND give me pointers on scaling!
With his input, Link Robins is now supporting REDIS + Horizon and running on the latest Valkey Version as a replacement for REDIS.

I am fully committed to supporting Flarum 2.0 as well. Thank you to all that have stuck by with me, supported me, and helped me shape Link Robins to what it is now!

navindra

KBExit Just curious, but how do you decide when a site needs to move to the next hosting tier beyond $60?

Is it only limited by what the assigned VM can handle or there's some traffic limit?

ernestdefoe

navindra one of the biggest advantages to hosting with LinkRobbins is the one on one approach that @KBExit has. He usually responds pretty quickly and he’s very knowledgeable and goes the extra mile to figure things out if you’re having an issue and he doesn’t stop until he gets it figured out.

KBExit

navindra now that you mentioned it. I am just going on full transparency here: https://beszel.dev/
This is the system I am in the middle of migrating to.

KBExit

ernestdefoe thank you! I appreciate that message!

ernestdefoe

That's not a bad deal. Now is it only available to pay only yearly or can you do monthly for it?

KBExit

ernestdefoe thanks! Right now I can only offer yearly. I will look into bringing in monthly. But it's hard to do it for the cheaper plans since transaction fees will eat the bulk of it being that low. That's why I opted for yearly only 🙁

ernestdefoe

KBExit I was meaning on the Enterprise plan not the cheaper one. The reason I say that is because it might be easier for someone to come up with $50-60 a month than $600 up front.