Where to host your Flarum in 2026

Karl

Where to host your Flarum in 2026 — a new issue is out.

Read it here: https://linkrobins.com/blog/where-to-host-your-flarum-in-2026

This thread is the comments section for the issue.

jonathanp

Nice write-up, really useful roundup. One host I didn't see covered: has anyone here actually tried Brynforum for Flarum hosting? The name keeps coming up but I'm struggling to find honest reviews. How does it stack up on price, uptime, and keeping current with Flarum releases? Would be great to hear from someone who's run a forum on it.

Karl

jonathanp thanks! I haven't heard from anyone that used their service in all honesty.

tomriggs

Been self-hosting on a small VPS for about a year and it's been fine, but the maintenance adds up. Seriously eyeing a managed option for the next one just to stop babysitting the updates.

Karl

tomriggs full control! Make sure to make backups!

jonathanp

Following up on my own question here. I ended up deciding against Brynforum. I'm not knocking anyone who's had a good run with them, but I couldn't turn up much about who's actually behind it, no real company info or docs that I could find, so I didn't feel comfortable putting my forum on it. Went a different direction in the end.

Karl

jonathanp you did what you felt was right to you. There's nothing wrong with!

denismccormick

Slightly different angle on this one: I'm not weighing up Flarum hosts so much as weighing up coming to Flarum from Discourse altogether. For anyone here who has run both, how does Flarum hold up against it day to day? I'm mainly wondering about the stuff Discourse leans on heavily, like the trust levels, the built-in moderation tooling, and how much you end up relying on extensions to close the gap. We're seriously considering migrating our community over, so any honest comparison would be a big help before I commit.

Karl

denismccormick the best suggestion I have for you is to just spin up one of my sandboxes and give it a shot. Spend a couple hours on it for a couple of days and see how you feel about it. Discourse and Flarum are both built for the modern day forum, but they also differ on a lot of aspects.
If you want something that's leaner, Flarum is the way to go. If you want all the bells and whistles, Discourse has all of that.

denismccormick

Karl will do, I'll grab a sandbox and put it through its paces over a few evenings.

One thing I keep noticing though: your main site and this forum feel like a single, seamless product. The branding and navigation flow straight from linkrobins.com into the forum with no jarring handoff, which is honestly a big part of what's drawing me to Flarum. How easy is that kind of tight integration to pull off in practice? And would the same thing be difficult to achieve on Discourse?

Karl

denismccormick thanks for noticing it! The site is all built on Laravel and with Flarum also based on Larvel, it made the integration fairly simple in comparison to a lot of the other software I've ran in the past. Friends of Flarum does offer a SSO extension called Passport, but I don't think it's ported over for Flarum 2.x yet.
So your mileage may vary.
I have no clue about Discourse, but looking at the way Ghost and Discourse integrate with a third party script outside of the ecosystem, it make be more complicating and sensitive? Not knocking anything down, but it seems very limiting.

denismccormick

Karl that makes a lot of sense, the shared Laravel foundation clearly pays off. Good to know about Passport too, I'll keep an eye out for the 2.x port.

I'm seriously weighing this up now. I actually spun up one of your sandboxes and I've been playing with it, and so far I really like what I'm seeing. If it keeps holding up, I'm hoping to properly adopt Flarum and, honestly, reclaim a big chunk of RAM and CPU in the process. Discourse has been eating my server alive, so getting that headroom back for the rest of my stack would be a win on its own.

Karl

denismccormick now I don't know if s migration script exists yet for what you're going to want to do... I can look around.

denismccormick

Karl appreciate that, but don't go out of your way. I'm actually already planning to just point Claude at it and have it convert the database from Discourse's schema over to Flarum's for me. The two data models are pretty different, but that sort of mapping is right up its alley, so I'll let it do the heavy lifting and see how it works out. Worst case, I find out where the rough edges are before I do it for real.

Karl

denismccormick just let me know if you need anything!

denismccormick

Karl will do, thank you!

leona_b

good framing. the who do you want maintaining the machine line is exactly it. ive done the self hosted vps route for years and its cheap, a fiver a month easy, but the article isnt wrong about being the person patching php at 11pm. the composer updates are fine right up until the one release that breaks an extension and youre suddenly debugging on a saturday night. worth it if you enjoy that stuff, rough if you dont.

jonathanp

Really balanced write-up 🙂 The FreeFlarum angle resonates with me. I started a little community on it a couple of years back, and the “start free, graduate later” path is genuinely how it played out for us. Knowing you can export everything and move on if you outgrow it takes all the fear out of committing early.

tomriggs

the managed specialist option is tempting but giving up root always makes me a bit twitchy. that said if its someone like daniel klabbers whos basically lived in the flarum core for a decade thats a different story, thats exactly the sort of person id trust with the box. whats the exit like though if you ever want to leave, do you get a clean dump of the whole thing or are you stuck

polyester

The “supports PHP is not understands Flarum” line is spot on. I ran a forum on a generic cPanel host with a one-click installer for a while, and it was fine right up until something broke, at which point their support had genuinely never seen Flarum before. You end up being your own support anyway, so a specialist or a VPS makes more sense in the long run. The one-click papers over the setup, not the maintenance.