I’m a student and I want to run a forum for me and my friends. But I can’t because I have no money. Any suggestions?
@Koshy246 said in I’m a student and I want to create a NodeBB:
I’m a student and I want to run a forum for me and my friends. But I can’t because I have no money. Any suggestions?
it is actually free if you host it yourself. you just need a domain name and hosting server...
You can check this topic as well:
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/8431/nodebb-is-free-or-not
@crazycells yes it’s the server that Im looking for
@Koshy246 said in I’m a student and I want to create a NodeBB:
@crazycells yes it’s the server that Im looking for
maybe everyone in your group can chip in several bucks ?
we use digitalocean and pay $10 monthly for the server, but there is $5 monthly option as well.
None of my friends can either
@Koshy246 unfortunately, I do not know any free service. maybe others can direct you...
Ok thx 
If you're a student you can sign up for the developer pack on GitHub, I think... That comes with some free goodies like hosting on Digital Ocean
I happen to have experience in this area.
My forum is hosted at aliyun，it's nicely and Cost-effective.
Less than ￥300/year.
In what part of the world are you looking for a server
Although I cannot imaging running NodeBB on one of their $5/mo. rigs Maybe for ten users?
The $5 droplets on DigitalOcean are more than capable of running a NodeBB. It can probably handle 50+ concurrent users with some minor tweaking, though don't take my word for it 
@gotwf Unfortunately, I do not have enough technical knowledge to judge 
@julian said in I’m a student and I want to create a NodeBB:
The $5 droplets on DigitalOcean are more than capable of running a NodeBB. It can probably handle 50+ concurrent users with some minor tweaking, though don't take my word for it
Hi @julian , I would like to ask a follow up question here... any suggestion from you would be very helpful...
a few times a year -especially early May- we have far more than usual visit to our website (pls check the pic below), last year we had only 5 minutes long lost connection to the forum (the pages were showing "not found" error but forum wasn't down), but it was acceptable for us since it lasted only 5 minutes, however this year -since our forum is getting larger- we had two days long problem to access the forum, forum was there (never down) but we kept having "not found - you do not have permission to access this page" error when we click a link of a page in the forum, so we had to renew pages one or two times to view a page in the forum. What would be the best way to prevent this next years? Is there a temporary precaution we can take for a month only? Because current settings are enough for our normal traffic.
High traffic for us is that:
25.000+ unique visitor and 200.000+ total page view
We use Digital Ocean:
2 GB Memory / 50 GB Disk / NYC1 - Ubuntu NodeJS 8.10.0 on 18.04
@gotwf said in I’m a student and I want to create a NodeBB:
Although I cannot imaging running NodeBB on one of their $5/mo. rigs Maybe for ten users?
Currently with 20+ users it seems to work fine, but there are some slowdowns I've been seeing recently. 
@crazycells Newer node.js version would probably help. Other than that, are you running NodeBB on both ports? Have you looked at https://docs.nodebb.org/configuring/scaling/ ?
@julian said in I’m a student and I want to create a NodeBB:
@crazycells Newer node.js version would probably help. Other than that, are you running NodeBB on both ports? Have you looked at https://docs.nodebb.org/configuring/scaling/ ?
Thanks, these should help; I will forward this to our technical team.
Heh, evidently I stand corrected about DO and NodeBB. Used DO stuff early on (but not for NodeBB). They then became very popular and I saw significant increases in cpu usage without any commensurate increases in load. Boosted a couple droplets up a notch. Didn't do much. Spun up a virgin node and saw cpu loads into 2.x to low 3.x's just idling on my ssh connection. I bailed to a different provider and have not checked in with them in years. Maybe a scale/infrastructure growing too fast issue?
In any case, good that you can get it sorted for minimal costs. 
