Last issue I walked through the seven ways shared hosting fights Flarum. Now you're probably asking: "Okay — so where should I host it?" Fair question. Here's the full 2026 map, and the two names I'd hand my own community to.
In this issue:
- The four real paths for hosting a Flarum in 2026
- The two managed options I actually recommend — one paid, one free
- The questions to ask any managed host before you move in
The four real paths
1. Managed Flarum specialists. A host that does nothing but Flarum: they install it, update it, patch it, tune it, and answer support tickets with actual Flarum knowledge. You give up root access; you get your weekends back. This category is small — Flarum is a niche — but the best of it is genuinely excellent, and I'll name names below.
2. Free hosted. One serious option exists, and it's better than it has any right to be. The trade: you live on a subdomain, you pick from a curated extension list, and you're riding on donations. For a brand-new community that doesn't know if it will exist in six months, that trade is perfect.
3. Generic PHP hosts with a one-click installer. 20i, TMDHosting, HostArmada, and the container platforms like Elestio (from ~$11/month) will all run Flarum. Some do it well. But "supports PHP" is not "understands Flarum" — when a Composer update strands your forum between versions, a generalist's support desk meets Flarum for the first time on your ticket. Every warning from last issue's shared-hosting checklist applies here in full.
4. Self-hosting on a VPS. Still the price-performance king: a €5–10/month server runs a community of thousands, you control everything, and the setup is a weekend project the first time and a template forever after. The honest cost isn't money — it's that you are now the person who patches PHP at 11pm. If that sentence made you tired, you want option 1 or 2.
The two I'd actually recommend
Floxum is who I point people at for paid managed hosting. The short version of why: it's run by people who built the thing. Daniël Klabbers spent a decade on the Flarum core team (2015–2025) and ran the project itself for four of those years; the rest of the team has been scaling large communities since before Flarum existed. They've hosted Flarum communities since 2021.
The offer holds up to the pedigree: plans sized by concurrent users (Starter covers 30 people online at once, from €30/month or €330/year), soft limits instead of hard cutoffs, daily offsite backups, burst headroom to 5× your plan at no charge, and they handle updates, security patches, and extension installs for you. EU company, data stays in Germany. They'll even migrate you in — including from non-Flarum forum software. They also run the premium extension marketplace where things like blomstra's realtime and search live, which tells you how close to the ecosystem they sit.
FreeFlarum is the free recommendation, and I mean recommendation, not consolation prize. Donation-funded with a mission of getting new communities off the ground: SSL on every forum, daily offsite backups, updates and patches handled for you, and a solid set of extensions enabled out of the box. Most importantly — and this is the part that earns the recommendation — your data stays yours. You can export everything and move out any time, which makes it the single best "start here, graduate later" path in the ecosystem. Start on FreeFlarum; if the community takes off, take your export to a managed plan or a VPS.
Full disclosure: I retired my own Flarum hosting product recently, so I have no horse in this race — these are just the two options I'd trust with a community I cared about.
The questions to ask any managed host
Before you move a community in, make them answer every line:
- [ ] Can I export my full database and uploads, myself, any time?
- [ ] Who applies Flarum updates and security patches — and how fast?
- [ ] Can I install the extensions I want, or is there an approved list?
- [ ] Where does my data physically live?
- [ ] What happens to my forum the day I cancel?
- [ ] Will you migrate my existing community in — and is there a fee?
- [ ] Is there a hard user or traffic cutoff, or a soft limit with a conversation?
A good host answers all seven without flinching. A great one has the answers on their website before you ask.
My honest take
The right answer depends on one question: who do you want maintaining the machine? If the answer is "not me," pay Floxum and never think about PHP versions again — specialist managed hosting is the rare product where the premium buys back real hours every month. If the answer is "not me, and I have no budget," FreeFlarum will carry you honestly until the community outgrows it. And if the answer is "me, gladly" — a small VPS is still the best deal in forums. The only wrong answer in 2026 is the one from last issue: wedging a community into a shared-hosting plan that fights it.
Wherever your forum lands, know when it goes down before your members do. Point free uptime monitoring at it — checks from real infrastructure, incidents caught in minutes.
Which host is your community on — and would you pick it again? Reply below — this newsletter is a forum thread, and I read everything.
— Karl
