I ran into a similar problem with snapshots of a forum and email server – if there are scheduled emails when you take the snapshot they get sent out again if you create a new test server from the snapshot. And similarly for the forum.

I’m not sure what the solution is either. The emails are sent via an SMTP so it’s not as simple as disabling email (ports, firewall, etc.) on the new test server.

When I researched and tested some, I found the Presonus Eris E3.5 to be the best bang for the buck. The other close one was Mackie CR3, but the Presonus is better.

It seems like docker would be heavy on resources since it installs & runs everything (mysql, nginx, etc.) numerous times (once for each container), instead of once globally. Is that wrong?

I covered that in the OP. It requires coding ability for anything other than a simple blog.

Thanks!

I covered that in the links in the OP. It’s extremely limited. I didn’t find it useful.

Redline the cheapest option until it catches fire.

It’s an important business website that would have severe consequences if it went down during traffic spikes (which it does get).

Why are you worried about your site going down during traffic surge? Unless you’re running a critical service, there is no need to worry about this too much if it’s just your personal sites.

Because it’s an important business website that would have severe consequences if it went down during traffic spikes (which it does get).

With proper caching, your personal site can even tank traffics from reddit frontpage on a $5/mo vps.

Yeah, I’m using Cloudflare, and I saw that Wordpress has a built-in caching option, but I couldn’t find any info on how well that protects sites from traffic surges.

consider hosting it on platforms with autoscaling support such as netlify.

Yeah but I need an SSG with the same capabilities as Squarespace to do that, and as mentioned in the OP, that doesn’t seem to exist.

I’d recommend Statamic

I looked at the demo and it looks like a very simple text editor to make blogs.

Since you posted this into a self-hosting community…

I have two other websites hosted on a $5 Hetzner server (that counts as self-hosted right?). I’ve been considering adding a Wordpress, Grav, or static site to it. But as mentioned in the OP, I have to worry about the site going down if it gets a traffic surge, so I’m thinking it would be safer and similarly/more affordable to host a Wordpress site with Hostinger or GreenGeeks. Am I wrong?

Grab a Raspberry Pi, slap nginx proxy manager and ddclient into it, and point your domain to your home IP.

I’m not likely to do that, for multiple reasons.

It was a firewall issue. I disabled my firewall and it works.

The main issue is that Lemmy lacks many basic features that are included in Reddit, either by default or via RES and Toolbox addons. I listed some in the OP and the OP link.

I chose Xenforo because it’s been around for a long time, is feature-rich, and the most polished/professional software.

I also wasn’t considering hosting my own Lemmy instance at the time, which I now recognize as a future possibility, if it continues to develop more basic features.

That seems an argument not to start your communities on lemmy.world.

Lemmy.world was the main one targeted, but they all use the same software and have the same vulnerabilities.

you could just start a community on a friendly instance

The problem is knowing how long that instance will be friendly to you. Will they start blocking other instances you want to interact with? Will other instances start blocking them? And so on…

I’d be interested in your reasons why. The Lemmy limitations I listed are pretty important for me.

It is most aimed at community creators, not users. It’s true that users have limited options & autonomy either way.

But from my experience, forums tend to have less of the “mod corruption” issues that Reddit has. Probably because a forum is a monetary investment and they have an incentive to draw people in. Whereas lots of people just mod on reddit for power.

Lemmy only federates Lemmy instances as far as I know. Forums have lots of benefits that Lemmy instances do not. They’re way more polished due to being around for so much longer.

I had lots of important content I posted to reddit, as did other members of the community. The subs I ran weren’t fluff subs.

Forums are different for sure, but I think they’re similar enough. There’s even a phpBB front-end for Lemmy.

I picked Xenforo for my own reasons, but there are plenty of free forum software (which I listed in the link) that can be used.

I think the one thing missing is a way to federate forums.

The pricing changed just last month so it’s no longer effectively free for small users but it’s relatively cheap (for now).

Well it was only free for 1 year. After that, you’d be paying for the EC2 instance. It’s roughly the same now. You can get cheaper hosting than EC2 but you’re paying a bit more for SES.

I looked at the prices you quoted for other services and they seem ridiculously high

Yeah it’s nuts. I think people with zero technical knowledge who want something fast are the ones paying for those services. It’s surprising there’s so many of them, but there is the fact that all the search results are dominated by their SEO blogs so it’s very hard to learn about other options.

But even if you’re not technically knowledgeable you can pay someone a month’s worth of what those other services charge, and they can setup a self-hosted server for you.

For example, even using SES, if you attempt to originate too many emails to one provider in a single call, they may start rejecting everything - I had to put counters into the code to limit how many gmail addresses would be sent with each iteration. SES also rate limits so you need to manage that somehow.

I haven’t had any issues with this. The starting rates are pretty generous and I’ve been approved for the increases I requested.

You’ll also need to be mindful of the bounce rate and complaints

Sure. Same as with any provider.