Gombessa Fortunately, there is no unpredictability with Hetzner as I'm paying a fixed price per month that should be capped at about €3.79. Compared to other providers, the resource limits are extremely generous.
I feel fairly confident in this setup, because of 1) FreeFlarum has been running on Hetzner for 7 years and the number and scale of some of the forums it hosts dwarfs PT, and 2) PianoClack has been running for almost 3 years on similar resources. Also like Sophia pointed out, I'm not currently planning to directly host any big media files from users either.
Realistically, I'm not sure PT will have any sizable growth spurts going forward. The occasional mention on Piano World leads to a few more folks joining, but otherwise, I think we would be lucky if we get PianoClack levels of growth.
I very consciously avoided the big cloud providers because their pricing models are extremely complex. It appears I would need degrees in statistics and probability to understand what my monthly bills would be. These kinds of inscrutable pricing models are not for me, but I'm sure smarter folks know how to take advantage of them. Based on my trial runs, the value for money is very low considering that the risk is non-negligible that I may end up with a $100K AWS bill.
Sophia But even if I'm wrong, if this server really needs more juice, then it's very easy to rent a dedicated server from OneProvider or Kimsufi. For example OneProvider Paris offers dedicated servers with 1TB of storage and a 1Gbps connection with unlimited traffic for less than USD $8 (those are Atom based) or $20 (Xeon).
Wow, that's good to know!
rogerch Based on what we're seeing here, VS should hire @navindra to move pianoworld to the cloud
Haha, I have to admit the thought did cross my mind... especially given that I spent a couple of weekends porting over all my posts from Piano World to PianoTell. I did all of this without having access to the backends — neither on Piano World nor PianoTell.
I could use exactly the same scripts for any user. It would be trivial to update them to port over entire threads.
I do agree with you that to do it properly would be a lot of work with all the backwards compatibility considerations. VS has botched this sort of migration more than once apparently. However, I'm shocked that VS have not made more progress on this — have they given up?
