Hey everyone,
The SAFE Network Forum will be moved to the servers of Discourse.org later today.
Since its creation in April 2014, this forum has been hosted on the servers of DiscourseHosting, a small independent company based in the Netherlands. In April 2014, the hosting service of Discourse.org wasn’t available yet so it made sense to rely on a third party such as DiscourseHosting.
The Discourse.org hosting service was introduced in August 2014 and they added a standard hosting plan in February 2015.
With our current amount of traffic, we are able to fit on the Standard plan, but we will have to upgrade to the business plan if traffic continues to grow. Discourse.org has a generous discount for open source projects so we end up paying a very reasonable price (thanks to MaidSafe for paying the hosting fees).
One of the main reasons we want to host the forum with Discourse.org is that we want to directly support the team that is building the Discourse forum software.
Hosting is our core business at Discourse. The software is available for free, but its current pace is sustained by our hosting plans. By going with us you are directly helping us fund development and making it better for everyone else who uses it!
Technically speaking, we host all our customers on dedicated bare metal servers for performance. Our response times are considerably higher than cloud environments due to lack of virtualization which has a particularly bad penalty on Ruby applications.
We have built in quite a lot of redundancy to this set up. No customer runs on a single server regardless of plan. Everything is spread out to avoid hardware failures and for extra speed.
Source: meta.discourse.org
The migration will happen in about 9 or 10 hours from now. I will have to put the forum in read-only mode for about 1 or 2 hours. And once the migration is complete I will update the DNS to point to the server of the new forum.
Overall, I am super excited about this move and I think it will have a very positive impact on the SAFE Network Forum and the SAFE Network community