I'm all for helping out but someone from the tech community explain to my why a sub 1000 member forum board requires more than a $20/m VPS or some mini AWS account?
What is happening here that this site is taking up so much server resources? Does the database need a clean up? Does some of the code need a look at to see if something is causing issues?
The short answer is we inherited a legacy forum running on 2007 era forum software, that outgrew its database about a decade ago.
At the end of the day the hosting requirements are something like:
SMF 2.0.x (same major version released in 2007)
PHP 7.x (end-of-life unsupported for several years now)
Terabytes of bandwidth per month, more than any of the major free/cheap hosting tiers
Upkeep from things like AI bots going crazy indexing the whole site
Hundreds of database connections during peak times (a lot of free/cheap hosts would cut this off way sooner)
The software, unfortunately, is just really old and those requirements violate pretty much every economy hosting plan I've seen. Everything about it is slow and not very scalable, and patching 20 year-old spaghetti code in PHP is challenging without turning it into a game of whack-a-mole. On top of that, there's no record of what kind of changes and tweaks were made in the CelticsBlog days... what I received when I took over the site was literally a dump of the database and an undocumented pile of files that appeared to be an SMF forum. So as a bonus, it's quite brittle.
Interestingly these days with AI it might be more feasible for someone to pick it up and make more fixes and changes, but that's not something I can commit the time to myself right now, despite being a software engineer. I will say, I'm pretty handy with performance... my day job involves shaving microseconds off of a trading platform and I've personally built much larger systems than this forum. So while it's totally possible someone who simply invested time in it could make a major upgrade, it's also not a blind spot. Decades old PHP querying a gazillion database rows very inefficiently while keeping all of those pages public just adds up, when it's getting hit 10s of millions of times per month. Death by a million cuts.
All of that said, I'll probably still look around to see what other hosting deals are out there right now. The risk is, we move to another host to save a few bucks and all of the duct tape comes flying off and the site stops working, and it's all for naught. So my 1st, 2nd and 3rd instinct is usually not to mess with it. Long as it's running identical software on identical operating systems that I fully control, it should run indefinitely, if not inefficiently. 3rd party host decides one day it doesn't want to support something critical? Dead overnight.
Anyway, it's a fair question, but yeah -- it takes a lot more than you'd think, but also despite my abilities, I'm not exactly diving into it as an engineering project either.
Topic: Byennie's thread update on CelticsStrong (Read 600 times)