Pollux Thanks for taking care of this! Completely optional, but I hope you decide to share your amazing forum URL soon. Its a great retouch of the interface.
We are up to over 50 hosted. However, most use less than 50MB disk space of the 512MB and less than 2% of bandwidth per week. Hoping to host busier forums as the server is near completely idle... current Load Averages: 0.09 0.13 0.10 (6 cores on these nodes)
Here's a sorted list of sites with bandwidth usage:
hydnj Completely optional, but I hope you decide to share your amazing forum URL soon. Its a great retouch of the interface.
Yes, you're right, a link to my forum ist still missing.
We are still a small forum with only 15 members, but those are already quite active with more than 600 posts over a course of 12 days. Our disk usage is about 200 MB and our bandwith use per week is about 10% of the monthly allowance (the top spot at hydnj's sorted list). So even for us there is enough headroom for further growth.
So, for everyone interested, this is my forum:
Many will not be able to understand a lot of the content, as it's all in German, but you should be able to get an idea nevertheless. To achieve our distinct look I did quite a lot of customisations, which, unfortunately, at this moment are not yet fit for making them publicly available, as they are still very specific for our needs, e.g. the colours used for the different tags are hardcoded into our custom extension.
I've just applied - thanks for the offer!
Pollux Thanks for sharing. Remember, if you ever start to run out of bandwidth under the free plan, before upgrading, you can use Cloudflare. (will save around 70 to 90 percent monthly bandwitch) I use it for my blog.
Or contact me and I'll hand build one of our stripped down Debian 9 LEMP servers.
gingerbeardman My pleasure! Right now the biggest issue is a lot of users are signing up with fake emails and domains and then when they realize wow the server space is setup immediately (automated) with full access and capacity and this is real/legit... they then cancel and signup again.
I totally understand, I was also raised with the "nothing free can be good". But note that although this "plan" is free, we run a profitable business via paid hosting. There have been some who signed up free that were so impressed with the speed, they upgraded the same day. So the plan will remain free because it pays for it self once we can deliver a free experience that's beyond expectations and close enough to our paid services.
hydnj I’ve registered an account and my plan is currently pending. Any idea on how long that will take until it’s activated?
hydnj afwpe.tk
I am yet to change the name servers as I don’t really want to have it experience any down time. I’ll change them as soon as everything is active and in working order.
[deleted] Thanks. I don't see that account. .tk TLDs sometimes don't pass auth because of higher chance for use of spam (being free domains).
Please signup again. Once approved you will be able to open a ticket. Also continue any support communication there instead of here. (I'll look out for your account)
hydnj gotcha! Will do so asap.
hydnj done.
I think I will apply today, and transfer my old site over. Looking forward to it!
To be honest, my forum is not hosted at Stacklinux anymore (the free offer mentioned by the original poster).
I had exceeded the bandwidth limit of 5.00 GB per month due to the popularity of Moccato and I didn't want to use Cloudflare to reduce it. Frankly speaking, 5 GB is good for testing but not for a real community. Webhosting plans as cheap as a handfull of dollars per month offer a bandwidth of 100 GB or even 1 TB (1000 GB) and more.
At the time I switched hosting, my forum had a bandwidth of about 350 MB daily, so this was not sustainable under the free plan. At this time I had about 500-600 posts per week written by about 10-20 active users and probably some interest from further onlookers who didn't register. I wasn't ranked particularly well at Google and I didn't receive a lot of traffic via social media as well.
So, if you expect your forum to gain some attention, consider Cloudflare or think of a hosting solution with a higher bandwidth cap. The free hosting offered here has its limitations you should be aware of.
Frink The problem is that I cannot baby sit site owners. The free offering of 5GB was far more than enough to support thousands (1000's) of forum posts per week. Sorry about the late response, between travel and work I just didn't have the time to check into the free server offering.
Pollux Cloudflare would have done you well. You didn't exceed bandwidth because of valid traffic, but rather because file(s) in your /api/users/ folder were being abused.
All previous months you far less than 1GB of traffic. In fact just the previous month before the "exceeding" bandwidth you had used only 300MB of traffic. I cannot provide WAF or other monitoring of forums requests. Thus the suggestion to use services such as Cloudflare (free), Sucuri, etc.
The API folder was accessed during that month some 170,541 times, at over 70% of all requests and about 70% of total bandwidth for said month. In AWstats the filetype listed as "unknown". Cloudflare when setup correctly would have help guard your bandwidth from abuse or even bogus traffic.
You could have used the free cPanel account to download raw access log to see this on your own. I cannot offer that level of support free, for issues so basic/simple or it will consume too much time.
Thanks for giving this free offer a try! I hoped I could provide purely a hardware and network offering where I wouldn't have to constantly guide or support as there are already Flarum support forums and other self help options so that one could find the cause and solve a 15x to 20x bandwidth increase symptom.
See attached, without any identifiable information:
...That # of accesses to /api/users/ would be a red flag for me considering you mentioned: "At this time I had about 500-600 posts per week written by about 10-20 active users and probably some interest from further onlookers who didn't register"
Sorry I could not log into your account for you at the time. I just had zero availability. If I have the time I don't mind helping but I just don't have the time to support free accounts.
hydnj Cloudflare would have done you well.
Probably, but I don't want to use cloudflare when it isn't desperately needed. I'm not interested to use a fake encrypted connection, where the encryption stops in front of cloudflares doors instead of my own server.
You didn't exceed bandwidth because of valid traffic, but rather because file(s) in your /api/users/ folder were being abused.
No, there was no abuse and I told you so. The traffic was 100% valid.
All previous months you far less than 1GB of traffic. In fact just the previous month before the "exceeding" bandwidth you had used only 300MB of traffic.
That's OK, I had a sudden increase in traffic. This I told you too.
The API folder was accessed during that month some 170,541 times, at over 70% of all requests and about 70% of total bandwidth for said month. In AWstats the filetype listed as "unknown". Cloudflare when setup correctly would have help guard your bandwidth from abuse or even bogus traffic.
This was no bogus traffic and Cloudflare would not have been able to help here, as the response to these requests was (and still is) changing frequently.
You could have used the free cPanel account to download raw access log to see this on your own.
As I mentioned, I had no doubt about the reason for the sudden increase in traffic. The only problem was your cap of 5GB per month.
Thanks for giving this free offer a try! I hoped I could provide purely a hardware and network offering where I wouldn't have to constantly guide or support as there are already Flarum support forums and other self help options so that one could find the cause and solve a 15x to 20x bandwidth increase symptom.
Why do you have to monitor bandwidth increases as long as they are within their agreed limits? I moved my account before I hit this (monthly) limit, there was no cap on daily traffic. If you start with a forum from scratch and know some people who are interested in your forum a 15-20 fold increase is not so unusual.
Pollux What you describe with Cloudflare is only applicable if you setup that way. ?
You can use the FULL (Strict) SSL option which locks end to end.
It's super easy to use their Strict mode. They'll even give you a certificate for the origin for free: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-ca-encryption-origin/
Or you can just bring your own certificate from someone like Let's Encrypt.
Regarding bandwidth, just like the Cloudflare argument, also mistaken. However, nothing to gain here with me debating that. Most forum owners here know their current bandwidth usage etc.
hydnj my entire website is down... can’t access ftp, ssh, nor the cpanel!
Link:
afwpe.tk
(I’ve already emailed you and submitted a support ticket, im yet to get a response)
