Bandwidth Usage

buildit

Firstly, thank you so much for building FreeFlarum. It’s an amazing appetizer to flarum.

I know it may be hard…. but it would be helpful to have bandwidth usage data for our FreeFlarum site.

I’m worried my forum will outgrow FreeFlarum quickly, but I don’t know how much hosting I will need, because I’m not sure how much data transfer is occurring on my current site to calculate my hosting needs. This also affects which host I will choose, and specs, etc (I’m new to self-hosting).

Even a way to roughly calculate this would be helpful….

Thanks!

ShiningVenus

I support this suggestion and I just wanna be able to move it to a host that is bigger if i did outgrow it.

buildit

@SKevo Even if you could tell us how much bandwidth, and storage you are using to host all the FreeFlarum sites you currently host, that would be helpful.

Also their user counts, active users, and total posts. Ballparks help.

Then I can plan and budget hosting. Thx.

SKevo

Sorry, I missed this thread somehow. FreeFlarum currently uses the CAX31 plan on Hetzner, this can accommodate at around max. 5000 active forums. The outgoing traffic is capped at 20 TB, so far FreeFlarum has never crossed that limit.

If you want hosting for a big community, I’d recommend https://flarum.org/hosting, which is a quality, managed Flarum hosting by the Flarum team. Some more affordable options for smaller forums include a shared hosting, or a cheap VPS. For one forum, I think something like 4 GB with decent storage space for uploads is sufficient, if you don’t expect high traffic (there is no need to overthink it, given that FreeFlarum allocates 512 MB per every forum in the PHP-FPM pool, plus some RAM for MariaDB).

buildit

SKevo FreeFlarum currently uses the CAX31 plan on Hetzner, this can accommodate at around max. 5000 active forums. The outgoing traffic is capped at 20 TB

Interesting. Very helpful.

Wait so you’re hosting 5,000 forums on a single shared plan with 20TB traffic?

How are you able to host 5,000 forums at $7/mth while Flarum is trying to charge $50/mth for only 50 simultaneous users?

Do you have rough total user counts, simultaneous user peaks, and total posts? Just for estimating.

For data sovereignty purposes, I’d host in my local country. I just don’t know if I need VPS/dedicated or how far shared would take me in scaling. It sounds like storage isn’t a big issue, moreso bandwidth?

SKevo

buildit Wait so you’re hosting 5,000 forums on a single shared plan with 20TB traffic?

Yes, but just to clarify, the 5000 forums is maximum that FreeFlarum can host. Currently there are at around 3000 online forums, and like 70 % of those are empty because people created them and then abandoned them.

buildit How are you able to host 5,000 forums at $7/mth while Flarum is trying to charge $50/mth for only 50 simultaneous users?

Over-optimization and compromises. FreeFlarum is a free service for starting communities or test forums - it comes with no warranty, uptime guarantees or fitness for serious purposes. Another thing is that the server resources are not evenly distributed for each tenant forum at all times - some forums are more active, some are less, and some are unused, as I mentioned before, the resource allocation for database and webserver therefore fluctuates in real-time. On the other hand, Flarum has the guarantee for scaling, uptime, data integrity, etc. and it likely has a far superior hardware too, so it makes sense it’s paid in comparison to a free service that lives from donations.

buildit Do you have rough total user counts, simultaneous user peaks, and total posts? Just for estimating.

I can calculate the user/discussion/post counts for all forums in total, or a specific forum, but IMO it isn’t relevant to estimate it for the entire FreeFlarum, nor a helpful info to you in the context of your forum only? I don’t know how big your forum currently is (if you share your forum URL, I could tell) or how big you want it to become, like I said, it’s enough if you start small and scale later.

buildit For data sovereignty purposes, I’d host in my local country. I just don’t know if I need VPS/dedicated or how far shared would take me in scaling. It sounds like storage isn’t a big issue, moreso bandwidth?

Shared is enough, no need to overkill it at start or else you’ll end up paying for extra hardware power you won’t even be using/need. Of course, it all depends on how big you expect your forum to grow - migrating to a more powerful hardware later is a viable option for this IMHO, instead of pre-allocating the power according to rough estimates of how big you want your forum to be.

buildit

SKevo I can calculate the user/discussion/post counts for all forums in total, or a specific forum, but IMO it isn’t relevant to estimate

Very helpful man. Knowing this ballpark would help, because it would help me create a capacity/usage formula, to plan out a scale. Not trying to pry, just don’t know any other source to get an idea of this.

SKevo I don’t know how big your forum currently is (if you share your forum URL, I could tell) or how big you want it to become, like I said, it’s enough if you start small and scale later.

Current forum is a dummy forum. No promotion. Just testing + exploring.

I’ve scaled apps over 100k users and made the mistake of not pre-planning the scale. Nightmare. Destroyed the app. 😂

If I scaled it, I’d be looking to take out Reddit in Canada. I think Flarum actually has the building blocks to do this (with heavy mods). So end term TAM would probably be 10-20m users. Maybe 5m DAU’s. And 10’s of thousands of posts per day.

But being able to handle an initial promotional burst of say 100k users, 10k DAU’s, and 1,000 posts per day would at least make me comfortable enough promoting it, without imminently face-planting lol. Which somehow feels not far off of what FreeFlarum would be running site-wide. Maybe you’d be 20k users? Prob nowhere near 10k DAU’s. But even 200 posts per day (peak) seems not far off?

CoffeeTime seems to be your biggest by a longshot?