AmiBay needs a new host - suggestions welcome - RESOLVED

Merlin

Ministry of Retr0bright and Street Judge
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Nov 24, 2007
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UK
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We are looking to change hosting from 1&1 in Germany because frankly, the old host and support from 1&1 aren't up to it. Also, we have planned an upgrade to VBulletin 5 that needs doing, but a lot of the addons and plugins in VB4 aren't compatible with VB5.

AmiBay is funded on a donations basis and our budget is around £50 maximum per month, based on the level of current donations. We aren't looking for charity or free hosting here, what we are looking for is a decent hosting for a reasonable price. If the donations were better, we could afford a better setup.

Our choices are to go the cloud hosting route or stick with real hardware. Real hardware is great but based on our budget, we'd struggle to get beyond dual core processors and around 8Gb ram. I have no experience of cloud servers, I'm the first to admit that. Either way, we ideally would need a managed LAMP setup (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHPMyadmin) so that we wouldn't have to worry about updates to the infrastructure underneath the site.

The site database is about 10Gb, images take up a lot of space (about 20Gb) and we'd need at least 100Gb of drive space for the site and development work.

Can members share their experiences of hosting and maybe recommend a host that could fulfil what we need at a reasonable cost? In the interests of transparency, I'm throwing this out there.
 
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OK, we have an update for everyone. We've managed to secure a great hosting deal that gives us a significant improvement in the hardware to run the site. The price is about the same as we were paying and that's good. We are also looking to launch the site on the new server running Vbulletin 5 as another upgrade. Please bear with us while we setup and configure the new site, as a lot of things have changed in VB5 and a lot of the plugins and add-ons we have under VB4 may not be compatible with VB5.

We will keep you posted on a regular basis as we progress with the new server.

All donations are welcomed, please contact Davideo if you wish to donate towards the site. Thanks all.
 
In the best 1990s tradition...

construction_8.jpg
 
The test site is up and running and we are currently testing the plugins that we need to run the site. Things are progressing nicely, although we may have an issue with the iTrader feedback system, as it's no longer supported and there's no official version or an alternative for Vbulletin 5. If anyone knows of any feedback system that is running on a VBulletin 5 forum, can you please let us know?
 
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