malins
Stumbling Seeker
A problem here is going to be that using a CDN will require a continuous and maintained increase of cash flow. Not just a one time funding effort but continuous.As we are speaking about technical stuffs now, I have to wonder if we can try using a CDN to (hopefully) mitigate the problem. I don't know XenForo well, but it's highly likely that such a popular commercial forum software would offer a some form of integration option with CDN providers.
In non-technical terms, CDN is a caching service for resources like images or javascripts and it usually runs multiple servers across the globe to automatically select the one closest to each user's location.
It can not only make loading a website much faster, but also can reduce the traffic to the original server significantly, because only non-cached resources will be pulled from the origin.
CDN usually costs money, but as it can potentially reduce the traffic by a significant margin, it can save the cost paid for the bandwidth.
Off the cuff switching the server to HTTP/2 instead of HTTP/1.1 might be a thing
Also there are a lot of small, individual HTTP requests to static files (like emojis, avatars). For each of these, cookies are passed along in the request headers, but the cookies have no functionality for a static file. A low end trick here is to simply use a separate 'cookie-free' subdomain exclusively for serving static content - something like 'static.cruxforums.com' - this would include all the things that can be seen without having a login (and that is ... thumbnails, logos, avatars, emojis). You can do this just by configuration without requiring a bigger VM.
How to Use Cookie-Free Domains - KeyCDN Support
To use cookie-free domains involves separating the content that doesn't require cookies from the content that does, therefore reducing network traffic.
www.keycdn.com