Databoost.dev
Intro
On the past week I’ve started a Forum for Data Professionals to discuss challenges and ideias in way to create a safe discussion space.
The motivation for creating this was related to a big layoff thread happening in tech on the begining of the year, in a way to support some of my past colegues, not losing track of them and some way also to share job opportunities or support to kickstarters.
The forum is based on https://nodebb.org and this article explain how I’ve setup the hosting of the aplication.
Fell free to join if you have an interest in Data, no fees and we sure need someone helping producing content.
Domain Registration
Not much to describe here that part needs to be paid normally on a yearly basis.
I’ve used http://www.godaddy.com but http://www.amen.pt also presents some good rates.
Hosting
For this one I picked Google. As it has a Free Tier you can achieve a 0-cost hosting if you don’t got abose the usage.
Important to pay attention on the machine you provision and the region.
If you choose a e2-micro with a 30GB disk in one of the following US regions:
- Oregon: us-west1
- Iowa: us-central1
- South Carolina: us-east1
NOTE: Check the offical docs as this may change
NodeBB
Installation of NodeBB was straight forward from the offical documentation
The project is pretty well organized and the documentation is very good
I’ve setup some extra plugins like SSO with gihub and google, Google Analytics, Reactions and some themes.
I opted by the mongodb option and not the redis one.
After some customization on the Backend it was done.
GCS
Having the following options on the free tier:
- 5 GB-months of regional storage (US regions only) per month
- 5,000 Class A Operations per month
Decided to setup a cron job to backup the application
Cloudfare
I also change the DNS domain servers from godaddy to cloudfare as they also support a Free tier which allows me to take advantage of caching and other benefits like DoS protection
ntfy
This service is simple and very usefull. I’ve configure some services to use it like if there are any issues with the backups or access to the system, but look on the Examples Section for some of the things you can achieve.
SSL
I also setup https://certbot.eff.org in order to have SSL enable, but that is something that I still need to check with the functionality provided from cloudfare, If I should change
Mailjet
I also configured Mailjet and Sendmail to relay all mail to that service. The free tier allow me to use with some limitations that service for newsletter setup and campaign management
Google Analytics
Always good to have visibility on the engagement, activated the GA plugin and setup the tracking.
This still needs some work in this part.
Conclusion
In this article I’ve been trough the options I did to setup databoost.dev a forum for Data Professionals. The hosting and other SaaS options used to achieve a “zero” cost option.
Feel free to join and support us.