Hey guys, a Codexer here. My main account seems to be locked here. How is RPGDot hosted (what code base does it run, how much does it cost?)
Preserving old RPG forums is a hobby of mine. I recently resurrected an old RPG forum in read-only mode, although the forum was in Russian, so there's not much for you to check out. It's
rpgplanet.ru and its predecessor
realms.su -- they ceased to exist in 2006 and 2004 respectively.
They originally ran on vBulletin. I didn't bother trying to make the old php engine work in today's day and age. I wrote my own engine from scratch in Vue.js and Node.js. Took me about a month, as I was learning it. I'm originally a game developer, not a webdev, but webdev is so much easier it's almost a joke.
I'm renting an Ubuntu VPS for $2.89/month. It's got 1GB DDR4 2400Mhz, a 2.6Ghz Xeon CPU, and it's more than I'll ever need to run it. Node and MySQL take about 100 MB in memory. The CPU could easily manage a hundred people at the same time or more, because the code is very very simple.
As a sidenote, please don't use Drupal, it's a horrible idea. We're not in 2010 anymore.
@Myrthos; if you want to preserve this forum, I could probably hook up your database to my engine that is bulletproof from the security standpoint, simply because it has no functionality other than retrieving forums, threads and profiles. You'd obviously remove the passwords from the DB. You could even remove the email addresses. I could host it on my server, too. I'd need to rent an additional hard drive, which would be pennies. Or you could host it on some super cheap amazon VPS.
The most difficult thing for me would be to write the additinal code to display the front page and the news articles in Vue+Node. But I think this is important, this is history preservation. Whatever new platform you guys want to migrate to afterwards, you don't want to lose all this stuff. You'll regret it, believe me. And if you decide to postpone hosting it in read-only mode, 10 years from now you won't even remember how to run it.
I'd like to help you out with the preservation of this website, if you need it. It'd be actual work, though, so it would have to be paid. Afterwards, maintaining a copy of this site would cost you the domain name + 3 bucks per month for another 20 years, until the Vue and Node codebase becomes old. Although given their size, it would be extremely easy to refactor some code to the new JS standards we'll have 20 years from now.
Let me know.
In an ideal world, I would've liked to convince you to stay afloat, slowly move to a new engine and allow users to post news. News posting has to be driven by the community, like people have been doing for ages on Reddit-like websites. This would let you never worry about neither the content, nor the costs, and host it till the end of your life, and maybe even beyond that if you arrange it.