Ewout
Member
What is the cost like Alex? If it's beyond reasonable (> €30 monthly) that can be cut down to €5-€10 monthly.
I'm an SRE by trade and could help architect and implement a more cost-efficient solution (and something reproducible from your end by using e.g. Terraform).
If you have a semi stable internet connection and a spare computer, you could setup XenForo on there from home. This may sound ridicilious and a very amateurish setup, but it not necessarily is. I have worked with Fortune 500 companies that use that exact setup with millions of requests per day. The performance all dependents on smart response caching, and a fast site-to-site VPN implementation.
Something usually teckled by an "edge" server, which could be a really cheap VPS on e.g. Scaleway, TransIP or Hetzner (just examples, any reputable cloud provider will do) . This edge server runs the VPN server (WireGuard), proxy web server (NGINX) and the response-caching software (Varnish and Yahoo's Apache Traffic Server). Varnish and ATS are heavily configurable and can manipulate the cache settings per HTTP request and response, meaning even misbehaving web applications that don't set the appropriate caching HTTP headers can be cached. With a stale-while-revalidate implementation strategy, there will be zero extra latency from a visitor perspective.
site visitor <--> edge server <--> NGINX (TLS termination) <--> Varnish (L1 memory cache) <--> Apache Traffic Server (L2 disk cache) <--> VPN (WireGuard) <--> your spare computer at home running XenForo
In terms of energy usage, in idle state (C6 to C8) x86 computers are very efficient. The CPU scheduler on Linux can be configured to queue work smartly enough to leverage the lowest power state for the remainder of CPU cycles that is not needed in a given time. On Intel platforms this is the best supported. AMD can be a bit of a power sipper in idle. With such setup, I'd wager median power usage would be max 25W per hour.
Do you have a spare Intel machine? If not, a second hand Dell/HP prebuilt with e.g. Sandy Bridge can usually be found on craigslist for around €25-50. That'll more than suffice.
The costs will be flat this way, only paying for a fixed price VPS monthly (and internet subscription at home, but should be fine with anything 1-3Mbit/s up honestly, you're not running a video content site ;P) and a one-time investment in some hardware (+ yearly new SSD would be recommended)
I'm an SRE by trade and could help architect and implement a more cost-efficient solution (and something reproducible from your end by using e.g. Terraform).
If you have a semi stable internet connection and a spare computer, you could setup XenForo on there from home. This may sound ridicilious and a very amateurish setup, but it not necessarily is. I have worked with Fortune 500 companies that use that exact setup with millions of requests per day. The performance all dependents on smart response caching, and a fast site-to-site VPN implementation.
Something usually teckled by an "edge" server, which could be a really cheap VPS on e.g. Scaleway, TransIP or Hetzner (just examples, any reputable cloud provider will do) . This edge server runs the VPN server (WireGuard), proxy web server (NGINX) and the response-caching software (Varnish and Yahoo's Apache Traffic Server). Varnish and ATS are heavily configurable and can manipulate the cache settings per HTTP request and response, meaning even misbehaving web applications that don't set the appropriate caching HTTP headers can be cached. With a stale-while-revalidate implementation strategy, there will be zero extra latency from a visitor perspective.
site visitor <--> edge server <--> NGINX (TLS termination) <--> Varnish (L1 memory cache) <--> Apache Traffic Server (L2 disk cache) <--> VPN (WireGuard) <--> your spare computer at home running XenForo
In terms of energy usage, in idle state (C6 to C8) x86 computers are very efficient. The CPU scheduler on Linux can be configured to queue work smartly enough to leverage the lowest power state for the remainder of CPU cycles that is not needed in a given time. On Intel platforms this is the best supported. AMD can be a bit of a power sipper in idle. With such setup, I'd wager median power usage would be max 25W per hour.
Do you have a spare Intel machine? If not, a second hand Dell/HP prebuilt with e.g. Sandy Bridge can usually be found on craigslist for around €25-50. That'll more than suffice.
The costs will be flat this way, only paying for a fixed price VPS monthly (and internet subscription at home, but should be fine with anything 1-3Mbit/s up honestly, you're not running a video content site ;P) and a one-time investment in some hardware (+ yearly new SSD would be recommended)
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