Image Gallery Hosting I have a vBulletin discussion forum (version 3.8) which hosts a large number of images posted by the forum members over time (domain age is 10 years). ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ list of top cheapest hosting http://listtop.pw/ Top 200 best traffic exchange sites http://listtop.pw/surf list of top gpt sites list of top ptc sites list of top ptp sites list of top crypto currency Wallets sites Listtop.pw Listtop.pw Listtop.pw +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I joined a CDN some years ago (MaxCDN) and also CloudFlare but I didn't notice any significant improvement in my forum pages speed/load time with their services. I have a limited technical background and I would appreciate any advice regarding Image Gallery Hosting which I found incidentally in my CPanel Softaculous Apps Installer. I understand it is not a free App but I can purchase it from my host if it is easy to install/implement and would help improving the overall website speed and pages loading time. There are some gallery apps for Softaculous. Do you know the name of the app you are interested in? There are some gallery apps for Softaculous. Do you know the name of the app you are interested in? Thanks for your comment. I don't know which of them is good for a vBulletin 3.8 Forum? I don't know of any apps within Softaculous that integrate into vBulletin - but I am sure there are plugins/extensions that can do it. Are you trying to separate the gallery from the forum itself / host it elsewhere? It's quite likely that slowness in your site isn't due to images. Well I think any apps or plugins will help you in improving the speed/load time. Its a natural fact that images always take time to load and loading time depends on the size of images. what you can do is to set a limit on the size of images that can be uploaded by the members of the forum. That might going to effect the loading time. I don't know of any apps within Softaculous that integrate into vBulletin - but I am sure there are plugins/extensions that can do it. Are you trying to separate the gallery from the forum itself / host it elsewhere? It's quite likely that slowness in your site isn't due to images. Thanks for your comment. I don't know if there is any way to host my vBulletin forum images in a separate gallery? Can I use my MaxCDN subscription for storing images? Well I think any apps or plugins will help you in improving the speed/load time. Its a natural fact that images always take time to load and loading time depends on the size of images. what you can do is to set a limit on the size of images that can be uploaded by the members of the forum. That might going to effect the loading time. Thanks for your comment. Do you recommend any particular plugin for vBulletin to help with images loading time? Thanks for your comment. I don't know if there is any way to host my vBulletin forum images in a separate gallery? Can I use my MaxCDN subscription for storing images? You can probably set it up so that MaxCDN hosts the images but how you would go about it with vBulletin I'm not sure. If you use a literal separate gallery - you'll probably want to try to find something with a vBulletin integration / login share. I got confused reading the first few posts. But based on what you've described initially, you're mainly concerned about page speed/load performance and you're looking for a hosted image service that will help speed up your page loads, which you believe is primarily impacted by the images. Typically that's the job of a CDN. But as you found out not all CDNs are built for performance. I would take a step back though. What is slow with your page load? Is it the time it takes for the page to start rendering or the time it takes for the whole page to load from top to bottom? How big is your images/pictures/attachments folder? UNIXy - Fully Managed Servers and Clusters - Established in 2006 Server Management - Unlimited Servers. Unlimited Requests. One Plan! cPanel Varnish Plugin -- Seamless SSL Caching (Let's Encrypt, AutoSSL, etc) Slow Site or Server? Unable to handle traffic? Same day performance fix: joe@unixy I would take a step back though. What is slow with your page load? Is it the time it takes for the page to start rendering or the time it takes for the whole page to load from top to bottom? How big is your images/pictures/attachments folder? Good questions - I don't personally suspect that the images are the problem myself. Good questions - I don't personally suspect that the images are the problem myself. Yeah you had a hunch for that earlier. Sound question to ask. The last thing OP wants to do is go down the wrong path with a misassumption and waste money/time. UNIXy - Fully Managed Servers and Clusters - Established in 2006 Server Management - Unlimited Servers. Unlimited Requests. One Plan! cPanel Varnish Plugin -- Seamless SSL Caching (Let's Encrypt, AutoSSL, etc) Slow Site or Server? Unable to handle traffic? Same day performance fix: joe@unixy There are online site loading speed analyzers and you can use it to identify the loading time for each item including the graphics and locate where the slowness comes from. For the Softaculous app, I've never used one myself, but there is an app called Coppermine that supports vBulletin FYI. I got confused reading the first few posts. But based on what you've described initially, you're mainly concerned about page speed/load performance and you're looking for a hosted image service that will help speed up your page loads, which you believe is primarily impacted by the images. Typically that's the job of a CDN. But as you found out not all CDNs are built for performance. I would take a step back though. What is slow with your page load? Is it the time it takes for the page to start rendering or the time it takes for the whole page to load from top to bottom? How big is your images/pictures/attachments folder? Thanks for your comment. Here is my most recent GTmetrix report: https://i.imgur.com/5O1VqqA.png Images have a significant impact on my forum pages download speed! MaxCDN and CF are not helping with the speed issue in contrary to what I was expecting! There are online site loading speed analyzers and you can use it to identify the loading time for each item including the graphics and locate where the slowness comes from. For the Softaculous app, I've never used one myself, but there is an app called Coppermine that supports vBulletin FYI. Thanks for your comment. I visited the website you suggested but unfortunately I didn't understand how to integrate the app with my vBulletin forum: Coppermine is a multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick as image library with a MySQL backend. Coppermine is free software which you can download and install on your webspace. If you came here from a "Powered by Coppermine" link on a photo gallery, please read these Frequently-Asked Questions. I joined a CDN some years ago (MaxCDN) and also CloudFlare but I didn't notice any significant improvement in my forum pages speed/load time with their services. Because this will depend also on your hosting performance. You need to check that too. Specially 4 You ||| Elevate Your Sites . JoneSolutions.Com ( Jones.Solutions or Jones.Hosting ) is on the net 24/7 providing stable and reliable web hosting solutions and services since 2001 Because this will depend also on your hosting performance. You need to check that too. Thanks for your comment. I opened several tickets with the support team of my host "KnownHost" regarding the marked slowness of my website but they said it is most likely related to external hits from the bots and Facebook. They advised me to apply crawl-delay for facebookexternalhit bot and to block some other bots. There are a few web crawlers that crawl websites very intensely and we find they offer very little benefit to our customers. A few examples are mj12bot and semrushbot - they often consume a lot of resources crawling your website for data that they then sell back to you in the form of SEO advice if you choose to use their services. Using crawl-delay can be a helpful tactic in making sure bots like these do not consume a needless amount of resources and impact your "real" visitor experience. I applied these rules to my robots.txt file and upgraded my VPS package with them to their Managed VPS - 4 although my average daily visitors in between 1-2K only as per Google Analytics! They also changed my MySQL 5.6 to MariaDB 10.1 hoping this would help improving my website speed but it is still slow on Pingdom, Google pagespeed and GTmetrix tests! I have very limited technical backgrounds and I thought hosting my forum images on a gallery may help and that's why I opened this thread to get advice from the experts here. Thanks for your comment. I opened several tickets with the support team of my host "KnownHost" regarding the marked slowness of my website but they said it is most likely related to external hits from the bots and Facebook. They advised me to apply crawl-delay for facebookexternalhit bot and to block some other bots. If you have an especially large forum with a lot of content it's very possible that the bots represent more traffic and resource usage to your website than actual visitors. Setting crawl rates and denying bad bots is always a good first step. Looking at the link you posted to GTMetrix it a lot of room for improvement, however one of the biggest things to remember. Vbulletin 3.8 was released in 2009, so it's almost 10 years old at this point. This means you're missing out on 10 years of coding enhancements which allow things to run much more efficiently. If you can let me know a ticket number I'll take a look at your site/server and see if I can recommend any additional enhancements for you on the server-side of things. My honest opinion, site unseen would be to convert this old forum over to newer software like Xenforo and you'd see a night and day difference but that can be a big undertaking and not everything converts over so it's always good to get an experienced individual involved for that. KnownHost Managed VPS Specialists Fully Managed Shared, Reseller, VPS, KVM, WordPress, Dedicated servers and more! KnownHost is hiring! Click here for more information! If you have an especially large forum with a lot of content it's very possible that the bots represent more traffic and resource usage to your website than actual visitors. Setting crawl rates and denying bad bots is always a good first step. Looking at the link you posted to GTMetrix it a lot of room for improvement, however one of the biggest things to remember. Vbulletin 3.8 was released in 2009, so it's almost 10 years old at this point. This means you're missing out on 10 years of coding enhancements which allow things to run much more efficiently. If you can let me know a ticket number I'll take a look at your site/server and see if I can recommend any additional enhancements for you on the server-side of things. My honest opinion, site unseen would be to convert this old forum over to newer software like Xenforo and you'd see a night and day difference but that can be a big undertaking and not everything converts over so it's always good to get an experienced individual involved for that. Hi Daniel, Thanks for your comment. I opened several KH support tickets regarding my website slowness, down times and poor server performance ([KHsupport #946540], [KHsupport #958159], [KHsupport #943937], and others). The remedies were only transient and short-lived. Regarding my forum vBulletin 3.8 software, I'm able to upgrade to the most recent vBulletin 5x version because it is part of the package I already purchased from vBulletin, but the reason I'm keeping my 3.8 version is the recommendation from experts in vBulletin software. They advised that the vBulletin 3x versions are more stable compared to the 4th and 5th vBulletin generations. There are many vBulletin famous forums are still on the 3rd vb generation up until now for this reason. Even, vBulletin is keep developing its 3rd generation and they have recently released their 3.8.11 version. I would like here to thank everyone in KH support team for their swift response to their customers opened tickets but I think they don't have enough experience in vBulletin software in particular, compared to other softwares like Wordpress, etc. Hello, I have a vBulletin discussion forum (version 3.8) which hosts a large number of images posted by the forum members over time (domain age is 10 years). I joined a CDN some years ago (MaxCDN) and also CloudFlare but I didn't notice any significant improvement in my forum pages speed/load time with their services. I have a limited technical background and I would appreciate any advice regarding Image Gallery Hosting which I found incidentally in my CPanel Softaculous Apps Installer. I understand it is not a free App but I can purchase it from my host if it is easy to install/implement and would help improving the overall website speed and pages loading time. Thanks, Ah, vBulletin 3.8, the good old days! I'm guessing you want to provide an image gallery hosting website seperate to this so the images aren't directly hosted/saved onto your forum website? - fairly easy to implement, although, I've never used one of cPanel Softaculous Apps for this, I've always purchased an image uploader and used that instead at a seperate location, another alternative is to disable permissions for users to upload images via the default method and make them soley upload elsewhere for instance imgur.com and just bbcode the image in, it'll work exactly the same way as it currently does but will make your web speed x10 faster as the imaging is no longer hosted with you. Ah, vBulletin 3.8, the good old days! I'm guessing you want to provide an image gallery hosting website seperate to this so the images aren't directly hosted/saved onto your forum website? - fairly easy to implement, although, I've never used one of cPanel Softaculous Apps for this, I've always purchased an image uploader and used that instead at a seperate location, another alternative is to disable permissions for users to upload images via the default method and make them soley upload elsewhere for instance imgur.com and just bbcode the image in, it'll work exactly the same way as it currently does but will make your web speed x10 faster as the imaging is no longer hosted with you. Thanks for your comment and suggestions. Do you recommend any particular image uploader to purchase and how to install/implement for my vBulletin forum? Also, can the uploader host the older images or it will take effect for images added after installation only? Thanks, I don't think the images would slow your website, it's probably the server speed is not OK. but you doubt it and think that the script is the problem you can try speeding up your vBulletin from the tips given in their website, hope it helps. I don't think the images would slow your website, it's probably the server speed is not OK. but you doubt it and think that the script is the problem you can try speeding up your vBulletin from the tips given in their website, hope it helps. My forum was previously hosted with urljet.com without problems in speed and pages loading time because they are mainly specializing in hosting vBulletin forums and they know how to deal with and optimize vBulletin software, the only drawback with them was their high managed VPS pricing which is much higher compared to the other top rated hosts like liquid web. Knownhost offers reasonable managed VPS pricing and they have an excellent support team but their overall server rating is average in my personal opinion based on 3 years experience with them. I applied these rules to my robots.txt file and upgraded my VPS package with them to their Managed VPS - 4 although my average daily visitors in between 1-2K only as per Google Analytics! They also changed my MySQL 5.6 to MariaDB 10.1 hoping this would help improving my website speed but it is still slow on Pingdom, Google pagespeed and GTmetrix tests! I have very limited technical backgrounds and I thought hosting my forum images on a gallery may help and that's why I opened this thread to get advice from the experts here. Many things can be done here not just MySQL. You need to take a close look at the php speed process, the response of your drive, etc... Specially 4 You ||| Elevate Your Sites . JoneSolutions.Com ( Jones.Solutions or Jones.Hosting ) is on the net 24/7 providing stable and reliable web hosting solutions and services since 2001 Hi Daniel, Thanks for your comment. I opened several KH support tickets regarding my website slowness, down times and poor server performance ([KHsupport #946540], [KHsupport #958159], [KHsupport #943937], and others). The remedies were only transient and short-lived. Regarding my forum vBulletin 3.8 software, I'm able to upgrade to the most recent vBulletin 5x version because it is part of the package I already purchased from vBulletin, but the reason I'm keeping my 3.8 version is the recommendation from experts in vBulletin software. They advised that the vBulletin 3x versions are more stable compared to the 4th and 5th vBulletin generations. There are many vBulletin famous forums are still on the 3rd vb generation up until now for this reason. Even, vBulletin is keep developing its 3rd generation and they have recently released their 3.8.11 version. I would like here to thank everyone in KH support team for their swift response to their customers opened tickets but I think they don't have enough experience in vBulletin software in particular, compared to other softwares like Wordpress, etc. Howdy, Thanks for the tickets, I'm going to be digging further into this over the next bit. I did compare your Vbulletin install with a WordPress install on your same server and I'm fairly confident this is isolated to Vbulletin and some of the processes it's trying to kick off, the forums are very heavy in the amount of front page content they are displaying. There are also several things I can see that need to be tweaked including getting rid of some older PHP versions for most of your sites, but you're stuck with PHP 5.6 for the Vbulletin version you are on. I'll open up a ticket here shortly with you about this but your Vbulletin install is fairly heavy so we'll just have to see what can be changed to try and make it better for you. I still stand by getting on a newer forum thou, Vbulletin 3.8 will never support PHP 7.2 and PHP 5.6 is already EOL now. I can't speak to the stability of Vbulletin 4 or 5 as I don't have a ton of experience with it, just predominately with Xenforo. As time goes on thou by using software this old you open yourself up to more and more potential problems and exploits. There may indeed be lots of forums running 3.8 still, but the rest of the technical world has left them behind: http://php.net/supported-versions.php KnownHost Managed VPS Specialists Fully Managed Shared, Reseller, VPS, KVM, WordPress, Dedicated servers and more! KnownHost is hiring! Click here for more information! Thanks for your comment and suggestions. Do you recommend any particular image uploader to purchase and how to install/implement for my vBulletin forum? Also, can the uploader host the older images or it will take effect for images added after installation only? Thanks, There's that many uploaders available today, I've not used any since closing my forum down in 2017, the uploader I used was Imgur (a simple code implement into your template does the trick) - If you want your own uploader to moderate, I can't really help with that, as i've not had a forum for awhile, the personal uploader I used no longer exists. There was an addon which someone who worked for vbulletin released on vbulletin,org back in 2009, which provided a seperate uploader and if memory serves me correct, image transfers from vb to it. it was discontinued several years ago when he left for XeoForo. To save issue, i'd just upgrade your hosting plan and implement an uploader for future imaging, less work load on your side. Howdy, Thanks for the tickets, I'm going to be digging further into this over the next bit. I did compare your Vbulletin install with a WordPress install on your same server and I'm fairly confident this is isolated to Vbulletin and some of the processes it's trying to kick off, the forums are very heavy in the amount of front page content they are displaying. There are also several things I can see that need to be tweaked including getting rid of some older PHP versions for most of your sites, but you're stuck with PHP 5.6 for the Vbulletin version you are on. I'll open up a ticket here shortly with you about this but your Vbulletin install is fairly heavy so we'll just have to see what can be changed to try and make it better for you. I still stand by getting on a newer forum thou, Vbulletin 3.8 will never support PHP 7.2 and PHP 5.6 is already EOL now. I can't speak to the stability of Vbulletin 4 or 5 as I don't have a ton of experience with it, just predominately with Xenforo. As time goes on thou by using software this old you open yourself up to more and more potential problems and exploits. There may indeed be lots of forums running 3.8 still, but the rest of the technical world has left them behind: http://php.net/supported-versions.php Thanks Daniel for your comment and the tweaks you and Derrick made for my server, much appreciated. My website is still slow as per GTmetrix and Google insights but is definitely better after the improvements you introduced. I understand what you said about the benefits of changing from vBulletin software to a newer software like Xenforo, but practically this solution is difficult, taking in consideration that my forum was established in 2008 and a lot of data and plugins may be lost or stop functioning during such change. There's that many uploaders available today, I've not used any since closing my forum down in 2017, the uploader I used was Imgur (a simple code implement into your template does the trick) - If you want your own uploader to moderate, I can't really help with that, as i've not had a forum for awhile, the personal uploader I used no longer exists. There was an addon which someone who worked for vbulletin released on vbulletin,org back in 2009, which provided a seperate uploader and if memory serves me correct, image transfers from vb to it. it was discontinued several years ago when he left for XeoForo. To save issue, i'd just upgrade your hosting plan and implement an uploader for future imaging, less work load on your side. Thanks for your comment. I'll search for imgur or any similar uploader code to implement for the newly added images by the members. I have an active subscription with MaxCDN but I use only their "Pull Zones". They have what they call it "Push Zones" which I'll explore to see if I can store some of my forum images with them, I have a plenty of unused space with them! Sounds more like an optimization issue. Image load time is not everything since the user still has to connect to your server, even if static content is hosted on a CDN, having a properly configured origin server is the first step to decrease page speed. ocean's 8 make money q money make a jugg download vikinghits.com hosting g suite make money 15 years old make money jay worthy domain availability image hosting for forum bitdigging.com stellarhits.com