How do you handle Technical Issues and Maintenance on your forum?

[Shawn Gossman]

Managing the technical aspects of a discussion forum, such as server maintenance, software updates, and security measures, can be demanding.

Ensuring the smooth functioning of the forum, addressing technical glitches, and maintaining data backups require continuous attention.

Is this a task that you do alone, or do you have additional staff members to help you?

What if you run into issues that even you can't fix? What next?

 

[joelr]

To begin with, most forums can and should be hosted on cloud services and platforms to begin with, like Discord, Reddit, Amino Apps, Facebook Groups, Mewe Groups, etc.

Independent self hosting is an anomaly, and a leftover from twenty years ago.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

To begin with, most forums can and should be hosted on cloud services and platforms to begin with, like Discord, Reddit, Amino Apps, Facebook Groups, Mewe Groups, etc.

Independent self hosting is an anomaly, and a leftover from twenty years ago.

Mine is on my VPS for now.

I need to figure out how to get it on CloudFlare without having issues.

 

[Tracy]

Is this a task that you do alone, or do you have additional staff members to help you?

Since I've had a site on a VPS, it's something I do myself. Of course, cut my teeth on Linux back when Slackware first came out in 1993 and it was released on 3.5" floppies.

What if you run into issues that even you can't fix? What next?

Not to "brag"... but haven't really had that happen yet. And hopefully never have to deal with it. 🤞
I have dealt with hardware/network issues that were specific to the VPS provider, but they were something I had no control over. If I ever ran into an issue I could not handle, I'd probably get MattW involved.

You have some that push SaaS... and for many, that's fine... but there is always a cadre of admins that want to have full control over their stack, and who also run more than one simple site of a particular script. For those, the economics of self-hosting (even with paying a management fee) will way outweigh having 4-5 sites (which many may not be "for profit") on different SaaS paid plans. That's something that many admins forget... not all sites are "profit oriented".
Then you have those that use free scripts (and a few of those sites are fairly large).... seems there is no SaaS offering for them.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Not to "brag"... but haven't really had that happen yet. And hopefully never have to deal with it.

So far I've been able to resolve mostly everything. I lost my "big board" to a database issue some time ago but most of my fault in it was that I wasn't making backups. I learned my lesson.

 

[Tracy]

So far I've been able to resolve mostly everything. I lost my "big board" to a database issue some time ago but most of my fault in it was that I wasn't making backups. I learned my lesson.

14 day rolling backups of the site and DB (tested regularly) are your friend..... and then to add into that, storing them in at least one remote location also.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

14 day rolling backups of the site and DB (tested regularly) are your friend..... and then to add into that, storing them in at least one remote location also.

What do you use for remote location storage?

Cloud-based server somewhere?

 

[Tracy]

What do you use for remote location storage?

NAS (Dell server with 22TB of RAID storage) at my house, 2 external portable drives attached to my MAC and a Synology RS1221 that I have access to at a remote location where I do free work for.
I see how "remote" might have been misunderstood. I meant on a device other than the server that the site is hosted on (albeit I do use the Synology now which is also a 3rd site but that is very recent).