hydnj Those who've applied, we will respond shortly (today).

Did you get my application?

      Thanks! Not sure where that email went. Checked spam etc. Will follow up shortly.

      Just wanted to give a short notice to everyone following this discussion.

      In the meantime I have setup my Flarum forum with @hydnj of Stacklinux (the free offer he mentioned above). The process was very smooth and hosting seems fast as hell. For those interested, at webpagetest.org my forum got an AAAAB rating, the B for "cache static content" mainly for not using a CDN. At this stage, there is not much a hoster can do to improve performance.

      The process of setting up the flarum hosting was very sleek: hydnj asked me for the domain name (which I registered myself before), an account username and my desired password, then he sent me the credentials to my cPanel. I just had to point my domain name to the IP he provided. With a few clicks I setup the MySQL database and completed the flarum install process, the email configuration was already setup. Also creating an FTP account and gaining SSH access (both like MySQL provided by cPanel) was very easy. Composer to install extensions was already available. Even an SSL certificate was included, I just had to edit the .htaccess file myself to force the use of HTTPS.

      My forum is not public yet and therefore not hit by a lot of traffic, I expect that to change soon though. Once that happens, I will give you an update about my experience. For the time beeing, I can't praise enough this offer and the guy himself.

      If you're looking for a good hosting for your Flarum forum, give hydnj and Stacklinux a try.

        I'd like to test this up. Do I need to buy a domain myself or you give that for free? Also, is this offer only for flarum or it can be used with custom scripts?

          Pollux Thanks for such a kind follow up. Can't wait till your Flarum goes live. Custom design looks incredible.

          Justice Thanks for your interest. The account allows you to host 1 website and 1 subdomain. So you can for example have... website.com + forum.website.com within the free SSD hosting account.
          We don't purchase domains, but you will receive an email with the nameservers to point your domain to.

          Hope this helps!

                Justice Do I need to buy a domain myself or you give that for free?

                I know that many hosters offer a domain name included. I thoroughly advise against this practice (has nothing to do with @hydnj). Domains are usually cheap today, so the difference to free is just a few bucks per year. On the other hand, separating domain hosting and webspace / server hosting gives you the unvaluable freedom of switching the webspace as you like.

                One scenario that's not too unlikely to happen: Your hoster (webspace and domain) can't or doesn't want to react to your increased demand or worse, goes out of business. You can easily setup your website with another hoster (given that you have access to all your data), but moving your domain can be a real hassle, especially if you part from your previous hoster in dissonance.

                All my domains are hosted by INWX. Dot.com domains cost about 15 USD per year, other TLDs are even cheaper. And you can choose between more than 1.000 top level domains.

                    Pollux Could not have said it better. I know of a few who've had to deal with that nightmare of hosting gone wrong. Also see: How to Rescue Your Website from the Clutches of a Bad Web Designer or Bad Web Host.

                    @Justice We also won't ask for your registrar's login details to help you. By help, it means we provide written instructions/steps you should follow as the site owner. If you have any other questions feel free to email me. I use Godaddy and iwantmyname for my domain ownership needs.

                      9 days later

                      sixu You are very welcome. Please see response to trouble ticket about changing your domain.

                        IyobosaJeffersonOsagie Please does it include a free domain name?

                        Please look here:

                        hydnj We don't purchase domains, but you will receive an email with the nameservers to point your domain to.

                        and here: Pollux

                                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:
                                alt

                                    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:

                                    https://moccato.de

                                    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.

                                        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.