Just want to share some data points about my experience of moving from many years of self hosted v4 to v5 in the cloud. My experience may be extremely rare or different from 99.99% of everyone else. I have no way of knowing. I don't want this to see representative of anything other than my own experience.

I love Invision Community and KNOW there is nothing that comes close to being as good. I keep my eyes open for alternatives, as a business can never have all eggs in one basket. Nothing even close ever comes up. The support team and I usually get along good, but my frustration sometimes boils over and we have butted heads. They have always remained extremely calm and professional, even when I have vented a few times. I am very thankful for that.

I don't expect perfection from anyone or any company. That's absurd.

Previously I paid $182 per month for a virtual server with 16GB of RAM and several TB of storage. This of course required me to do all the administration, a lot up front, but very little after it was setup.

With this server:

Elasticsearch

Email sent directly from the server, coming from my domain

A custom link shortening app, using my own domain, that I used to track clicks for advertisements and provide reporting.

Excellent Performance

Very few issues in the logs, comparatively.

Enabled my own use of Cloudflare to disable tracking users, and use dynamic URL configurations / workers however I want (not for the amateur, but also not rocket science).

Cloudflare also enabled me to monitor and control AI scraping my site. In addition, Cloudflare enables collecting payments for AI scrapes, but only when used for self hosted IC.

Zero tracking of my users and zero perfect scores in all the browsers that show people how many trackers have been blocked.

Now that I'm on IC Cloud

I'm paying

$162 per month for IC Cloud

$115 per month to send emails through Postmark, so I can keep my branding and emails come from my site, not sent on behalf of my site by IC.

$38 per month for a Droplet running Elasticsearch and my link shortening app.

Total - $315

I have zero admin duties with IC Cloud, but my support requests have increased greatly because of issues that I can't solve on my own and because of many more issues that I previously never experienced. I have admin duties for my Elasticsearch server and I have to manage my Postmark account, but that's pretty simple.

Performance on the Cloud is much worse than it was when I was self hosted. Cloud accounts clearly don't get the horsepower that IC's own site gets, and I understand that. For example, click on the notifications icon and note how long it takes to appear on IC's site versus one's own cloud site. It's vastly different. Again, I understand this, but it's a data point people should realize. Perhaps other IC Cloud plans offer better performance, but this is not stated in any of the plan pricing information.

in AdminCP the System Error log seems to have way more items, that I can't do anything about. I haven't had time to weed through them with IC support.

Other issues I see all the time, but I haven't had the time or energy to work through with support are these:

I get this all the time and always at the worst time. I'm accessing the site from my house, same IP address for the last ten years. This specific screenshot was when I connected via VPN, but only because I wanted to trigger it so I could take a screenshot (the Ray ID should show VPN if IC Support looks).

Attempting to reply to a topic, this endless circle happens way more than I'd like. Plus, you can see the images at the bottom aren't appearing. I have no clue why this only happens sometimes, without me changing anything.

Excuse the humorous image. I received the error at the bottom way too frequently on IC cloud.

I receive this issue way too often. Type a full response in a topic, then hit submit. Nothing happens. try it a few times, as if something will change. Nothing changes. I have to refresh the entire page in my browser, then hope it has cached my reply, then hit submit.

This one I have worked with IC support on, so it's just more of a note. As IC Cloud hosts a zillon sites, it's much more of a target than one's self hosted site. Because of this IC blocks many VPN servers. My users like to use VPNs. Now they have to be selective with the servers they connect through. Not terrible, but a difference between self hosted and cloud.

Again, I love IC, it's products, and support. There is nothing like it. But, the differences between self hosted and cloud are real, at least for me right now. It may come down to the trade offs between convenience and what I consider better performance and better options for a cheaper price with self hosted. There's no right or wrong here, just differences.

Edited July 30Jul 30 by Chris027

Have a look at Mailgun. It supports sending through your own verified domain and may be considerably cheaper than Postmark at your sending volume. I use it myself and have found it very reliable. Postmark may still have an edge in simplicity and transactional deliverability, but $115 per month sounds worth comparing.

32 minutes ago, Cedric V said:

Have a look at Mailgun. It supports sending through your own verified domain and may be considerably cheaper than Postmark at your sending volume. I use it myself and have found it very reliable. Postmark may still have an edge in simplicity and transactional deliverability, but $115 per month sounds worth comparing.

Looks to be priced similarly for me. I sent I sent 114,000 emails from 5/12 to 6/12. Plus, Postmark is integrated into IC.

Edited July 30Jul 30 by Chris027

Hi Chris. Thanks for your honest feedback. I’ve had a look through your tickets, and it looks like quite a few of the issues you’ve mentioned haven’t been submitted to us as tickets. I’d really encourage you to send these through when you come across them so we can investigate and help get them resolved. If any are there but closed and you are still having issues, please reply to those. A lot of what you’re describing isn’t typical behaviour. Issues with saving topics, or being unable to react to content, for example, shouldn’t be happening, so we’d definitely want to take a closer look at those.

Regarding the block you mentioned, this is being identified as a multi-proxy server, so it does look very likely that a VPN or similar service is involved there.

As Marc said, none of those are what we'd consider normal. However, we - and the rest of the internet - have experienced an explosion in bot traffic and have to be very suspicious of VPNs and other bot-like traffic. I find that when I'm on our company VPN, I'm challenged on almost every site I use. It's a sad state of the internet honestly, but at one point a site that usually gets 200k requests in a day got 90 million, and we had to pay for all that junk traffic - and that was just a single site.

We, and other vendors are stuck between a rock and a hard place. If we leave our WAF rules loose, you and others will be challenged less, but we end up paying for millions of junk requests. Other vendors have started passing that cost to customers in the form of overage invoices. If we tighten our WAF rules, those on VPNs and some countries will receive more challenges, but we are no longer losing thousands a week on junk traffic or passing that cost on to you.

Nearly 60% of all internet traffic is now from bots and they consume content 6 times faster than humans.

Also, our community here is a normal account in our network, there's nothing special about it and it's not on a special part of our network.

Thanks @Marc and @Matt , as always your responses are totally reasonable and part of what keeps me here.

With respect to the issues I noted, you’re totally correct that I haven’t reported those yet. The thing that stinks about reporting issues, and it’s unavoidable with anything in life, is that it requires work from both you and I to resolve. There will be follow up questions and other things. I know I have one open ticket about AI that’s waiting for a response from me it’s in my inbox and I need to reply. I just haven’t had the time to dedicate to this. I’m very happy to learn these issues aren’t normal.

The information about Cloudflare challenges and blocking VPNs is very helpful. I need to remember the internet is fluid and constantly evolving, for better or worse. You are absolutely right about the nonhuman traffic skyrocketing, compared to previous times in internet history. I understand adapting to this is required. I guess we can all thank the tech bros for this issue.

Thanks for listening and engaging.

Please do report them - especially and Ray IDs as we can quickly look them up and weed out any false positives by tweaking our WAF. It's an ongoing thing and we're always refining it.

My hope is that upstream providers like Cloudflare get better at weeding out this traffic as we get to grips with it and we can relax the rate limiting and challenges.

It's an interesting time.

Everyone wants AI to crawl everywhere but the internet is built for humans, not bots that run rampant and consume constantly.