Hosts and Attachments

Todd

Hello,

I am considering NodeBB for a brand new forum website. It will be a true forum-based site for discussion on my field of work. There aren't many of this type for my field so I'm excited. I have 3 questions concerning NodeBB and please excuse my ignorance but I develop using C, assembly, and sometimes Python and have been out of the JS/Node space for some time:

Can you recommend me some hosting services which provide decent/reliable service where I could easily install NodeBB or that already have NodeBB as a pre-loaded option? I can find a ton of PHP hosts but I'm in the dark about Node hosts. This is going to be a small site funded by me at first which will probably grow but I currently cannot afford AWS/Azure.
How does NodeBB handle attachments? My forum will need to have the ability to upload zips, 7zs, and image files. Can NodeBB handle a good amount of attachments?
Is there an easy way to turn on or install a plugin for syntax highlighting in-post such as for a software dev community?
Thank you. I've used this software before as I user and I think it looks and feels a lot better than phpBB and those older style of forums.

yariplus

You should look for a VPS host, I haven't found anything more reliable than DigitalOcean, they are a bit higher in terms of cost compared to other VPS choices, but I haven't used anything more reliable. I have a few servers from OVH too, and they are decent, they would be my second choice. AWS/Azure is overkill for a small or even medium size site.

I don't think there are many hosts that offer presetup NodeBB instances, but install is pretty much step-by-step and should be painless. There are also available Docker containers if you are familiar with Docker.

NodeBB will handle whatever you want to throw at it. You will likely need NGINX setup, and this is where you would set the allowed file types and upload sizes for local uploads. However, there is also an s3-uploads plugin that stores your files in S3 storage, the cost of which is very reasonable. This would probably be the best option for you if you expect a lot of uploads.
Not sure about this one.

Esteban Constante

I had my first server on a Dreamhost Dedicated Server.

Now I've moved it to Google Cloud.

How many users are you going to support?