A.R.S.E.

Check out digitalOcean https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ , they have one of the cheapest options ($5) if you can shave your needs down to 512MB. Altho I admit, I haven't tried them myself, yet. I'm about to set up a private VPN to see how it goes.
Amazon maybe a bit pricey, unless you want to renew it yearly with a new CC (one-year free period with a new card). But they provide top notch service. And a t2.tiny instance can run a forum nicely - just check xgn.com.au

Cool, Now I am fer_millo65..

Now VT..

Eh, I've forgotten that there's a t2.nano instance on amazon - which, if created eg in Oregon will cost ~$5 US/mo (bit less)
So they're equal.

Seems like its fixed?

Did we move or did Bluehost sort it out?

Still happening here.

You're lucky, pix. It's still crap.

Yeah, and I spent 2 hours yesterday trying to get Live chat to help me. The 2 people I talked to claim that was Kev was told is wrong.

We are working on it.

So you are not moving to a cloud provider?

He's trying to remember the password to his old Geocities page then we'll move it there.

w00dsy wrote:He's trying to remember the password to his old Geocities page then we'll move it there.

Smart move! That place should have heaps of dormant resources available.

Time for Wingdings to evolve with the times... wait, we are back to a point that Windings are common place emojis.

Whats the SQL database size? What kinda bandwidth we pull?

Lets just setup a AWS instance and build up a single server, AWS availability on EC2 in Syd would be plenty enough

The database is a whisker short of 900Mb

Bandwidth this year has varied between 600Mb (Feb was unusually quiet) and 3.1Gb per month. We used 35Gb last year averaging just under 3Gb/m. We get around 15000 visits a month from 5000 IPs. A lot of that is search bots though but we block most of them with a robots.txt file. But we have quite a high attrition rate of regulars. Nearly 80 accounts have visited this month.

For users, the people who visit the most look at around 3000 pages a month which is norbs, woodsy, hylas (in the AAR forum) and Dr Pain. Most of the rest average around 1400 pages a month. That sounds a lot but a page is every single iteration. Eg when you submit a post you get a load for the topic then a load for the reply form then a load for the 'you have submitted' page then the topic reloads again, so that would count as 4 pages.

nutty wrote:Whats the SQL database size? What kinda bandwidth we pull?

Lets just setup a AWS instance and build up a single server, AWS availability on EC2 in Syd would be plenty enough

Exactly what I've recommended. xgn runs fine on a t2.small instance, which costs about $20 AUD /mo all up. But it's possible to try something smaller, even. Altho I'd not really recommend that, the lack of memory on those can be a pain in the butt.
You can also buy a reserved instance once you're sure a certain size works, and save quite a bit.

Traffic costs are negligible (we run over 20 servers, and the traffic is about 40 bucks while we pay in the thousands for everything all up).
The server can be set up with a 8-10GB storage, altho I'd advise more, because on t2 (burstable) instances get their baseline I/O performance based on the size! So put a 30-50GB storage under (maybe necessary anyway if there's enough uploaded media to store), and it'll perform better.
But everything is burstable on a t2, cpu, i/o, network...altho network is a weak side of it.

Here's some info on the ec2 pricing - don't worry about storage & bandwidth prices, they're negligible.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

ysu wrote:

nutty wrote:Whats the SQL database size? What kinda bandwidth we pull?

Lets just setup a AWS instance and build up a single server, AWS availability on EC2 in Syd would be plenty enough

Exactly what I've recommended. xgn runs fine on a t2.small instance, which costs about $20 AUD /mo all up. But it's possible to try something smaller, even. Altho I'd not really recommend that, the lack of memory on those can be a pain in the butt.
You can also buy a reserved instance once you're sure a certain size works, and save quite a bit.

Traffic costs are negligible (we run over 20 servers, and the traffic is about 40 bucks while we pay in the thousands for everything all up).
The server can be set up with a 8-10GB storage, altho I'd advise more, because on t2 (burstable) instances get their baseline I/O performance based on the size! So put a 30-50GB storage under (maybe necessary anyway if there's enough uploaded media to store), and it'll perform better.
But everything is burstable on a t2, cpu, i/o, network...altho network is a weak side of it.

Here's some info on the ec2 pricing - don't worry about storage & bandwidth prices, they're negligible.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

$20/month is twice what we pay now. So not an option considering the forums are slowly dying. I will keep trying these bastards.

As I said, you can try a smaller instance.

If you want to give it a try, I'll set up a t2.tiny for you, give you full root access (the only thing is that you won't be able to start/stop the instance) and you can have your fun with it, see if it can take the ARSE forums.
I'm even willing to set up a lamp stack for you, it does not take much.

The tiny costs around $10/mo.

But! You can also create a new AWS account, and you can have a free tiny instance for a year. Then if it works, someone else can do the same in a year's time. The cc must change for the new account is all. Free hosting

Edit: actually, if I'm handling the hosting you won't have access to the firewalling rules either. But I can manage stuff fairly quickly, I've got some experience by now with the AWS interface jargon.

Edit2: you know what, I can even host the whole shebang for you, a small instance does not make a dent. I've offered this in the past and was refused, but here it is again.

Thanks for the offer YSU, but I think it is sorted.

Well, I bloody hope.

Looks aright, here's hoping

norbs wrote:I think it is sorted.

Well, I bloody hope.

Yay, looks like the posts are remaining read as well.

Thanks Norbs, im sure you wanted to kill many times over the last week.

thanks Norbs & Kev!

Well done gents. Seems to be back up and posting.