"Elf-Disclosure" for Nov 2024
November was intended to be a month of scaling in preparation for Black Friday / Christmas growth, but ended up being a month of rapid pivoting! Torrentio experienced a multi-day outage, significantly increasing the load on our public Stremio addons, and resulting in the addition of dedicated hardware for MediaFusion's mongoDB database as a stopgap.
The following week saw the withdrawl of cached-torrent-checking support at RealDebrid, followed quickly by the same from AllDebrid and Debrid-Link, which once again caused instability in the r/StremioAddons world, as well as impacting a subset of infinite streaming users (for a time).
The US datacenter once again got > 100% more capacity, we upgraded the store theme, introduced a new "lite" streaming stack (Zurglings), and weathered the Black Friday chaos!
To get us started, here are some shiny stats for Nov 2024, followed by a summary of some of the user-facing changes announced this month in the blog...
Stats
| Money | Sep 2024 | Oct 2024 | Nov 2024 |
| Expense: Cluster | $2,341 | $2,549 | $3230 |
| Expense: Store | $100 | $100 | $110 |
| Expense: CI | $100 | $100 | $100 |
| Expense: Cloud | $20 | $30 | $30 |
| Expense: Development | 180h / $27,000 | 180h / $27,000 | 210h / $31,500 |
| Expense: Advertising | - | - | $2,320 |
 Expense: OSS Sponsorship | $692 | $1,208 | $797 |
| Total Expenses | $30,263 ($3,263 cash) | $30,987 ($3,987 cash) | $38,087 ($6,587 cash) |
| Income | $7,700 | $8,706 | $10,018 |
| Income % of cash expenses | 267% | 206% | 152% |
| Income % of all expenses | 29% | 26.6% | 26.3% |
| Focus | Aug Sep | Oct 2024 | Aug 2024 |
| Subscribers | 260 | 327 | 464 |
| Unique visitors | 36.7K | 29K | N/A |
| Total pageviews | 96.7K | 72.9K | N/A |
| Discord members | 1461 | 1639 | 2219 |
| YouTube subscribers | 352 | 420 | 579 |
| TikTok followers | - | 1 | 28 |
| :simple-twitter: X followers | - | 24 | 88 |
| Focus | Aug 2024 | Sep 2024 | Oct 2024 |
| Total invested thus far | $263,628 | $294,615 | $332,702 |
| Total revenue | $27,844 | $36,095 | $46,113 |
| Income % of total invested | 10.56% | 12.2% | 13.8% |
Resources
The stats below illustrate CPU cores used (not percentage). These stats only cover the DE cluster at present, we're working on cross-cluster metrics aggregation to make this data more useful.
CPU load is 20% higher than the previous month, both on the tenant workloads and on the core shared components, which can be attributed to natural growth.
kubectl top nodes
NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%
fairy01 3658m 22% 87044Mi 67%
fairy02 3267m 20% 65232Mi 50%
fairy03 1224m 7% 55396Mi 43%
gretel01 3652m 22% 37297Mi 28%
gretel03 421m 2% 35907Mi 27%
gretel04 608m 3% 29845Mi 23%
gretel05 587m 3% 23535Mi 18%
gretel06 744m 4% 38082Mi 29%
gretel07 402m 2% 22856Mi 17%
gretel08 1661m 10% 49540Mi 38%
gretel09 920m 5% 43201Mi 33%
gretel10 319m 1% 21543Mi 16%
gretel11 1475m 9% 41644Mi 32%
gretel13 1303m 8% 60432Mi 46%
gretel14 1517m 9% 44000Mi 34%
gretel15 479m 2% 28107Mi 21%
gretel16 352m 2% 34447Mi 26%
gretel17 1334m 8% 34171Mi 26%
gretel19 1035m 6% 26623Mi 20%
gretel20 1211m 7% 50482Mi 39%
gretel21 5014m 31% 67119Mi 52%
gretel22 386m 2% 31139Mi 24%
gretel23 1140m 7% 44163Mi 34%
gretel24 734m 4% 40900Mi 31%
gretel25 431m 2% 33155Mi 25%
gretel26 1311m 8% 46667Mi 36%
gretel27 172m 1% 19855Mi 15%
gretel28 471m 2% 19587Mi 30%
gretel29 580m 3% 33220Mi 25%
gretel30 130m 0% 10528Mi 16%
gretel31 476m 2% 26610Mi 20%
gretel32 2880m 6% 20341Mi 15%
gretel33 1395m 8% 24415Mi 38%
gretel34 997m 6% 17750Mi 27%
gretel35 480m 3% 11919Mi 9%
gretel36 583m 3% 10981Mi 8%
gretel37 626m 3% 15602Mi 12%
hansel01 660m 5% 18274Mi 28%
hansel02 607m 5% 18744Mi 29%
hansel04 877m 5% 52755Mi 40%
hansel05 1376m 8% 40599Mi 31%
hansel06 2108m 13% 26675Mi 41%
hansel07 2071m 12% 26229Mi 40%
hansel08 697m 4% 33613Mi 52%
hansel09 698m 4% 27458Mi 42%
hansel10 1825m 22% 26776Mi 41%
hansel11 570m 7% 17345Mi 27%
hansel12 713m 8% 18136Mi 28%
hansel13 222m 2% 15802Mi 24%
hansel14 978m 8% 23242Mi 36%
hansel15 2685m 22% 27754Mi 43%
hansel16 803m 6% 26732Mi 41%
hansel17 866m 7% 26238Mi 40%
hansel18 1470m 12% 17273Mi 26%
hansel19 488m 4% 24473Mi 38%
hansel20 777m 6% 21164Mi 32%
Last month (Oct)'s for comparison:
kubectl top nodes
NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%
fairy01 882m 5% 45890Mi 35%
fairy02 1532m 9% 43153Mi 33%
fairy03 2267m 14% 55166Mi 42%
gretel01 334m 2% 30976Mi 24%
gretel02 1379m 8% 35811Mi 27%
gretel03 373m 2% 30883Mi 23%
gretel04 332m 2% 29125Mi 22%
gretel05 408m 2% 31347Mi 24%
gretel06 888m 5% 43780Mi 34%
gretel07 385m 2% 26784Mi 20%
gretel08 2208m 13% 41005Mi 31%
gretel09 617m 3% 31943Mi 24%
gretel10 409m 2% 19548Mi 15%
gretel11 1592m 9% 37144Mi 28%
gretel12 1424m 8% 37273Mi 58%
gretel13 1685m 10% 43285Mi 33%
gretel14 2056m 12% 44110Mi 34%
gretel15 1376m 8% 40326Mi 31%
gretel16 456m 2% 30383Mi 23%
gretel17 1270m 7% 49063Mi 38%
gretel18 1438m 8% 25130Mi 19%
gretel19 367m 2% 18622Mi 14%
gretel20 865m 5% 55660Mi 43%
gretel21 753m 4% 41983Mi 32%
gretel22 1354m 8% 25402Mi 19%
gretel23 1000m 6% 40607Mi 31%
gretel24 1499m 9% 36601Mi 28%
gretel25 498m 3% 26805Mi 20%
gretel26 287m 1% 20232Mi 15%
gretel27 133m 0% 17253Mi 13%
gretel28 93m 0% 10311Mi 16%
gretel29 271m 1% 26377Mi 20%
gretel30 129m 0% 11553Mi 17%
hansel01 2454m 15% 65828Mi 51%
hansel02 1546m 9% 35814Mi 27%
hansel03 2186m 13% 52735Mi 40%
hansel04 1289m 8% 50531Mi 39%
hansel05 1948m 12% 52989Mi 41%
hansel06 1420m 8% 46249Mi 35%
This graph represents memory usage across the entire (DE) cluster. Tenant memory usage increased 36% from the previous month, and apps which run on daemonsets (i.e., a pod on every node) show increased memory usage as a result of the expansion on nodes, as well as tenant growth.
Other high consumers of RAM:
- csi-rclone: used for mounting all rclone-compatible storage mounts, primarily RealDebrid libraries
- kube-system: the Kubernetes control plane, including the cilium agents which manage the networking / policy enforcement (currently 11K flows/s across 30 nodes)
- traefik: all inbound access to the cluster / services
- mediafusion: an excellent (but RAM-hungry!) Stremio addon
kubectl top nodes
NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%
fairy01 3658m 22% 87044Mi 67%
fairy02 3267m 20% 65232Mi 50%
fairy03 1224m 7% 55396Mi 43%
gretel01 3652m 22% 37297Mi 28%
gretel03 421m 2% 35907Mi 27%
gretel04 608m 3% 29845Mi 23%
gretel05 587m 3% 23535Mi 18%
gretel06 744m 4% 38082Mi 29%
gretel07 402m 2% 22856Mi 17%
gretel08 1661m 10% 49540Mi 38%
gretel09 920m 5% 43201Mi 33%
gretel10 319m 1% 21543Mi 16%
gretel11 1475m 9% 41644Mi 32%
gretel13 1303m 8% 60432Mi 46%
gretel14 1517m 9% 44000Mi 34%
gretel15 479m 2% 28107Mi 21%
gretel16 352m 2% 34447Mi 26%
gretel17 1334m 8% 34171Mi 26%
gretel19 1035m 6% 26623Mi 20%
gretel20 1211m 7% 50482Mi 39%
gretel21 5014m 31% 67119Mi 52%
gretel22 386m 2% 31139Mi 24%
gretel23 1140m 7% 44163Mi 34%
gretel24 734m 4% 40900Mi 31%
gretel25 431m 2% 33155Mi 25%
gretel26 1311m 8% 46667Mi 36%
gretel27 172m 1% 19855Mi 15%
gretel28 471m 2% 19587Mi 30%
gretel29 580m 3% 33220Mi 25%
gretel30 130m 0% 10528Mi 16%
gretel31 476m 2% 26610Mi 20%
gretel32 2880m 6% 20341Mi 15%
gretel33 1395m 8% 24415Mi 38%
gretel34 997m 6% 17750Mi 27%
gretel35 480m 3% 11919Mi 9%
gretel36 583m 3% 10981Mi 8%
gretel37 626m 3% 15602Mi 12%
hansel01 660m 5% 18274Mi 28%
hansel02 607m 5% 18744Mi 29%
hansel04 877m 5% 52755Mi 40%
hansel05 1376m 8% 40599Mi 31%
hansel06 2108m 13% 26675Mi 41%
hansel07 2071m 12% 26229Mi 40%
hansel08 697m 4% 33613Mi 52%
hansel09 698m 4% 27458Mi 42%
hansel10 1825m 22% 26776Mi 41%
hansel11 570m 7% 17345Mi 27%
hansel12 713m 8% 18136Mi 28%
hansel13 222m 2% 15802Mi 24%
hansel14 978m 8% 23242Mi 36%
hansel15 2685m 22% 27754Mi 43%
hansel16 803m 6% 26732Mi 41%
hansel17 866m 7% 26238Mi 40%
hansel18 1470m 12% 17273Mi 26%
hansel19 488m 4% 24473Mi 38%
hansel20 777m 6% 21164Mi 32%
Last month (Oct 2024)'s for comparison:
kubectl top nodes
NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%
fairy01 882m 5% 45890Mi 35%
fairy02 1532m 9% 43153Mi 33%
fairy03 2267m 14% 55166Mi 42%
gretel01 334m 2% 30976Mi 24%
gretel02 1379m 8% 35811Mi 27%
gretel03 373m 2% 30883Mi 23%
gretel04 332m 2% 29125Mi 22%
gretel05 408m 2% 31347Mi 24%
gretel06 888m 5% 43780Mi 34%
gretel07 385m 2% 26784Mi 20%
gretel08 2208m 13% 41005Mi 31%
gretel09 617m 3% 31943Mi 24%
gretel10 409m 2% 19548Mi 15%
gretel11 1592m 9% 37144Mi 28%
gretel12 1424m 8% 37273Mi 58%
gretel13 1685m 10% 43285Mi 33%
gretel14 2056m 12% 44110Mi 34%
gretel15 1376m 8% 40326Mi 31%
gretel16 456m 2% 30383Mi 23%
gretel17 1270m 7% 49063Mi 38%
gretel18 1438m 8% 25130Mi 19%
gretel19 367m 2% 18622Mi 14%
gretel20 865m 5% 55660Mi 43%
gretel21 753m 4% 41983Mi 32%
gretel22 1354m 8% 25402Mi 19%
gretel23 1000m 6% 40607Mi 31%
gretel24 1499m 9% 36601Mi 28%
gretel25 498m 3% 26805Mi 20%
gretel26 287m 1% 20232Mi 15%
gretel27 133m 0% 17253Mi 13%
gretel28 93m 0% 10311Mi 16%
gretel29 271m 1% 26377Mi 20%
gretel30 129m 0% 11553Mi 17%
hansel01 2454m 15% 65828Mi 51%
hansel02 1546m 9% 35814Mi 27%
hansel03 2186m 13% 52735Mi 40%
hansel04 1289m 8% 50531Mi 39%
hansel05 1948m 12% 52989Mi 41%
hansel06 1420m 8% 46249Mi 35%
The regular spikes on the contended nodes (hansels) warrant investigation. They may be routine, or the result of a misconfigured app. The gretel network ingress also seems unusually higher than the egress, which may indicate that once again, Plex is downloading content for local analysis, without actually streaming it back out again.
Why Hansel & Gretel?
Bundles are datacenter-agnostic, but nodes are specific to each datacenter, and we needed a way to differentiate US nodes from DE nodes. The fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel originates in Germany 
Last month (Oct 2024)'s for comparison:
Retrospective
US cluster
Since last month, the US cluster has grown from 33 to 45 users, and we've once again added >100% capacity (7 new yankees, bringing us to 13 in total).
Here's what the US cluster looks like today (compare this with the kubectl top output in the CPU/RAM sections above):
root@eagle01:~# k top nodes
NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%
eagle01 661m 8% 8958Mi 28%
eagle02 714m 8% 5699Mi 17%
eagle03 739m 9% 5112Mi 16%
yankee01 2465m 30% 18588Mi 58%
yankee02 900m 11% 15340Mi 48%
yankee03 2050m 25% 18995Mi 59%
yankee04 2683m 33% 13656Mi 42%
yankee05 2243m 28% 18419Mi 57%
yankee06 1091m 13% 16335Mi 51%
yankee07 989m 12% 2944Mi 9%
yankee08 1433m 17% 1265Mi 3%
yankee09 2782m 34% 2585Mi 8%
yankee10 2686m 33% 2270Mi 7%
yankee11 3135m 39% 5447Mi 17%
yankee12 3234m 40% 2288Mi 7%
yankee13 940m 11% 3376Mi 10%
And here's what it looked like last month:
NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%
eagle01 359m 4% 10241Mi 32%
eagle02 210m 2% 4875Mi 15%
eagle03 127m 1% 3852Mi 12%
yankee01 1122m 14% 16163Mi 50%
yankee02 1246m 15% 20112Mi 63%
yankee03 2834m 35% 20589Mi 64%
yankee04 804m 10% 19631Mi 61%
yankee05 458m 5% 14240Mi 44%
yankee06 1385m 17% 18742Mi 58%
If you'd like to gauge whether the US cluster would be more suitable for your workloads, visit https://speed.elfhosted.com and perform some comparative tests!
US East Coast DC
We don't have an ETA yet, but our US DC supplier have built out their Pennsylvania (PA) datacenter on the east coast, and we've indicated interest in establishing a presence there. With a PA datacenter on the east coast, and the existing WA datacenter on the west coast, we'd be better able to serve our US Elfies!
Please submit your suggestions for what the DNS suffix and node names should be!
Mooar apps
The following apps made their debut on ElfHosted during November 2024:
Actual
Actual Budget is a super fast and privacy-focused app for managing your finances. At its heart is the well proven and much loved Envelope Budgeting methodology.
You own your data and can do whatever you want with it. Featuring multi-device sync, optional end-to-end encryption and so much more.
JellyStat
Jellystat records and displays beautiful statistics from your Jellyfin server (like what Tautulli does for Plex), and is now included in our Jellyfin bundles.
SuggestArr
SuggestArr is a project designed to automate media content recommendations and download requests based on user activity in media servers like Jellyfin, Plex, and now Emby.
It retrieves recently watched content, searches for similar titles using the TMDb API, and sends automated download requests to Jellyseer or Overseer.
Calibre-Web Automated
We've had Calibre-Web available from day 1, but during November we transitioned to "Calibre Web Automated", which super-charges the regular Calibre-Web with:
- Automatic Imports ✨
- Automatic Conversion 🔃
- A Weighted Conversion Algorithm: ⚖️
- 28 Supported file types for conversion
- Automatic Enforcement of Changes made to Covers & Metadata through the Calibre-Web UI! 👀📔
- One Step Full Library Conversion 🔂 - Any format -> .epub
- Library Auto-Detect 📚🕵️
- Easy Dark/ Light Mode Switching ☀️🌙
- Batch Editing & Deletion! 🗂️🗄️
More details in this blog post
Improved store
Last month we forecast making some changes to enable express checkout in the store, and we used the impending Black Friday sale as a motivator to get this across the line. The following areas are vastly improved:
Express checkout with Apple/Google Pay
For complicated technical reasons, our Apple/Google Pay buttons weren't appearing on checkout because WooCommerce (and possible the gateways themselves) won't allow them to be shown for a $0 purchase, which is what a subscription with a free trial period looks like, to the gateway.
Until this issue is solved by the bugs we've lodged upstream, and judging that the benefit of offering Apple/Google pay vastly outweights the added friction, whenever a product includes a free trial, we've added a $1 signup fee, so that option to pay with Apple/Google Pay appears again.
Wishlist support
You can now "wishlist" any product in the store, which theoretically (still waiting evidence of this working "in the wild") will email you when that product goes on sale, or comes back into stock.
Improved theme
One of the primary motivations for transitioning to the new theme was to improve the checkout and the user dashboard experience, both of which should now look and work better, on desktop and mobile!
TrustPilot
We now have a TrustPilot page! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
We're at 10 reviews with an average of 4.3 out of 5, and your review would help us tremendously, so please go here, and leave your honest review!
(if you're unhappy though, please reach out to us first so we can make you happy beforehand!)
Zilean
Zilean is a scraper which indexers publicly shared DebridMediaManager hashes, parsing them in such a way that the collection can be searched by Stremio addons, Riven, and Prowlarr indexers.
Zilean is also used by popular addons like Comet and MediaFusion, which began to be adopted by the (massive) r/Addons4Kodi community.
Rather than having the public, just-in-time (resource-intensive) indexers scraped for what was essentially the public DMM hashes, we opted to expose a public Zilean instance, so that Kodi/Prowlarr users can scrape Zilean directly, which is far more resource-efficient.
The public Zilean instance is free to use without rate-limits (at present), since it's so efficiently cached, at https://zilean.elfhosted.com/scalar/v2
Project Zyclops
On the back of the public Zilean announcement, we unveiled "Project Zyclops", an Elf-sclusive configuration of Zilean and Zurg, to make all hashes in all our elfies' RealDebrid libraries available as scraping source for Zilean. This increased our (internal) Zilean's hashes by 10%, and this number will only grow as more users join #teamelf!
More details (and some geeky flowcharts) in this blog post
Zurglings
Due to the RealDebrid instantAvailability API removal, many users found themselves (for a period) unable to search for and add new content. DebridMediaManager reacted quickly, building their own "crowd-sourced" cache of known-to-be-cached torrents, making DMM a more-popular-than-ever way to find content to add to your RealDebrid library.
Our @Layezee had the brilliant idea of offering a "lite" version of our starter kits, without any automation (no plex_debrid, Riven, or Aars), but integrated quickly and easily into the DMM workflow.
As a result, existing users who were "dead-in-the-water", or new users who wanted something that worked "better than Stremio", could grab a "Zurgling", plug in their RD credentials, setup Plex, and happily add content to their library using DMM.
Here's our setup video to illustrate how easy it is:
Hatch your Zurgling! 
Wizards
Scratching another common itch, a Wizard is a one-time assist with a particular app or bundle setup. Wizards are a VIP, white-glove session with our existing knowledgeable and friendly ElfVengers.
The idea is that users wanting a "hands-off", "just-do-it-for-me" configuration can lock in a private session with an ElfVenger for the particular app/bundle they need solved, and work together on a one-to-one basis to delivery maximum geeky happiness!
Summon a Wizard!
Giftcards
Elfies are typically friendly and generous geeks, and since a season of rest and gift-giving is approaching, we thought you might want to give the gift of "Elfie-ness" (and endless tinkering) to friends / family.
We now offer gift cards in the store, at a range of price points intended to match our popular bundles.
Give the gift of Elfie-ness! 
Coming up
Hetzner scheduled maintenance
We underwent some of Hetzner's schedule maintenance during November, but there are more windows coming up in December, and if your .com (DE) nodes are listed here, then you'll be impacted by Hetzner's maintenance schedule, for up to 2 hours.
Even mooar apps
Apps currently requested can be found (and submitted!) here
Notable suggestions:
Guide / blog refresh (ongoing)
While we've completed the migration of the blog from the docs site to the store, the refreshing of our guides is still on the short-term to-do list.
Now that we have a mostly-workable theme for the store, the ElfVengers and I will be moving much of the guides from the docs site (https://elfhosted.com) to the store, since this is more suitable for frequent, collaborative edits.
We're not sure yet exactly where the division should be, but the docs site should remain technical and price-agnostic, whereas the store should present what we offer, commercially, as simply and attractively as possible.
Multi-debrid support
This is alreadly partly in place, but during December we'll be working (alongside the guide updates, above) on getting better coverage across multiple debrid platforms, including TorBox, AllDebrid, and Debrid-Link (the cached-checking endpoint changes sort of threw a wrench in this!)
Cautious for Christmas
We're going to try to avoid any overly-optimistic changes during December - everyone is looking forward to a Christmas break, and they'll be looking for stability and reliability, plus our ElfVengers and I may be less available over the period.
So we'll continue applying upstream updates to packages during our daily "glowup" over the holidays, but we'll try to avoid making any dramatic infrastructure or platform changes.
Your ideas?
Got ideas for improvements? Send us an EEP (ElfHosted Enhancement Proposal) here!
How to help
Another effective way to help is to drive traffic / organic discovery, by mentioning ElfHosted in appropriate forums such as Reddit's r/plex, r/realdebrid, and r/StremioAddons, which is where much of our target audience is to be found!
Join us!
Want to get involved?
Want to get involved? Join us in Discord!
What users say..
Here's what some of our usersfriends say..
I am new here, but today I learned realized that Elfhosted is one of the best free and open source software communities I've seen, and FOSS communities have been at the center of my life since the 90s (Perl, PHP, Symfony, Drupal, Ethereum, etc.). Great open software built by great people who care = great community, and that is something special.
You've done an amazing job @Funky Penguelf with the platform you provide and this place has an awesome mix of active community caretakers and software creators that I've seen here so far like BSM, Spoked, LayeZee and other elf vengers. Keep up the energy, productivity and community and take time to enjoy it and appreciate each other!
@skwah (Discord)
I self host and share a fully automated ‘arr stack with Plex. Been doing so for around 4 years. Also recently got into real debrid and hosting a Comet and Annatar for Stremio. The amount of time and head banging I’ve put into it is in the hundreds to thousands of hours. From setting it up to keeping it running smoothly. Let’s not forget the cost of my server and how much it cost to keep it running.
Anyway I wanted to see what ElfHosted was about to compare. Yeah I had the whole thing setup in just a few hours. It also passes the headache of maintaining it to ElfHosted. Will I keep it no because nerdy things and maintaining my server are my hobby and quirky passion project. Will I recommend it to my friends who don’t have the money up front to buy a server, the knowledge to maintain it or desire.
Just my server alone was $2k. Power cost to keep it on yearly is $250ish, annual memberships to RD, Usenet and indexers are around $100. Then whatever a value my free time at. Which is currently at minimum my hourly pay at work or more. Yeah so take the monthly cost of all that and compare to ElfHosted Ultimate Stream package at $39 monthly, add RD to the cost and get nearly all your time back is incredibly cheap.
Lastly it seems like a lot of people forget how quickly an ultimate cable package used to cost. Or how quick paying for every stream service would add up to. Which when using ElfHosted with RD is essentially and more what you get. Quick hint it’s far above the asking price.
/u/MMag05. (Reddit)
As a happy Elfhosted customer—who also self hosts MANY things across about 10 severs (dedicated, VPSes, and VMs running on Synology), I wouldn’t switch to self hosting the services I get from Elfhosted. They just work with very little effort configuring things, and the support the owner and his team provides is second to none. Plus I love being part of a fledgling—but quickly growing—enterprise.
/u/jatguy. (Reddit)
I recently found ElfHosted and decided to start out with the Infinite Starter Kit. Within a week I realized that this was for me and upgraded to the Hobbit plan. Give it another week and I was up to the Ranger plan.
I just love the simplicity and the fact that things just work. For years I've ran a home server and between the constant maintenance and always upgrading harddrives, it became apparent I wanted to make it easier on my self. Enter ElfHosted.
Setup was super easy with the guided documentation and the discord community. It seems that somebody is available at all hours of the day to help with questions. I started with the Aars, which I knew from my prior hosting... but saw a newer product called Riven. I decided to jump in feet first. I enjoy being on the front end of an up and coming replacement for the Aars and will soon be upgrading to the annual plan!
@.theycallmebob. (Discord)
I’ve been using this service for a while now, and honestly, it’s a game-changer compared to anything else I’ve tried for managing my media library. The support is fantastic—super quick, and if the staff aren’t around (which rarely happens), the community steps up right away. I can’t imagine going back to any other platform.
Before this, I had my own setup with a NUC, NAS, and tools like Sonarr and Radarr. It worked pretty well for a while, and my internet speed was high enough to stream without any buffering. But in the end, it wasn’t worth the time or headache of managing all the storage and keeping everything running smoothly.
Now, with this service, everything runs smoothly in 1080p+ with no buffering issues. The interface is really easy to use, which makes managing everything a breeze. Plus, having a whole community of smart people available for guidance is a huge bonus.
I was sold from the start, which is why I quickly upgraded from a 1-month to a 3-month subscription, and I’m planning to switch to a 1-year plan soon. This service totally pays for itself, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. It’s been really impressive.
@seapound (Discord)
Best possible options for anyone looking for the do-it-all option along with the best customer service ive experienced in this space so far. Id rate it a 6 if I could but its limited to 5/5...
@hashmelters (Discord)
(responding to a Reddit thread re the cost of ElfHosted vs mainstream streaming / self-hosting):
I didn't know that the goal of this project was to compete with large companies running/renting entire DCs. I was under the impression that the goal of this project was to manage the updating of almost selfhosted applications on a shared platform with other users. Basically, be my sysadmin for me.
That being said, paying for services is the 'easy button'. There is a real world cost incurred for the time saved. Time is money. Time is the most valuable currency that exists. Once time is spent, it's forever lost, one cannot retrieve it again (yet). In my mind, there are 3 options for use of time with respect to: mainstream, selfhosting, elfhosted.
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mainstream - my time is valuable and I don't want curated content and I don't care what content that I have the ability to consume. I only like what's popular.
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elfhosted - my time is valuable, I want my own curated content without being forced to browse past the same damn entry 500 times just to find out that I can't watch the movie I want because it's not available in my current location or was removed last week from mainstream providers.
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selfhost - I care about costs and I have nothing but time to waste or I want to learn about the backend of the systems involved. I'll pay for my own VPS/homelab, electricity, manage the OS, manage app updates, figure out how to make the apps talk nice to each other, create my own beautiful frontend.
I know how much my time is worth, does that reddit poster know how much their time is worth? Without knowing what you are worth, you can't make effective capital expenditures with respect to the time it will take to recoup the capital.
I know I don't need elfhosted at all for my use case. I choose to stay with elfhosted because it's my 'easy button'. It's an efficient capital expense for the amount of time it saves me managing my own hardware, apps and saves me electricity costs. I'm also in a situation where I don't have upload bandwidth from my home to serve HD content to myself remotely. If I lived back in a city, I would still be here. My time is worth $$/hr.
@cobra2 (Discord)
"Just wanted to check in here and let @Darth-Penguini and anyone/everyone else know...WOW. I have been struggling with storage for years, maintenance of Docker containers, upkeep, all of it. Elfhosted is so freeing. It's an amazing service that I hope to be a member of for a long, long time!"
@Fingers91 (Discord)
"I just have to say, I am an incredibly satisfied customer. I had been collecting my own content for nearly 20 years. Starting off with just a simple external HD before eventually graduating to a seedbox with 100TB of cloud storage attached and fully automated processes with Sonarr and Radarr . However, the time came when the glory days of unlimited Google Drive storage ended. I thought my days of having my full collection at my fingertips via :plex: were behind me, until I found Real-Debrid and ElfHosted.
Now I essentially have the exact same access to content as I had before, but even better. Superior support and community involvement. Content is available almost immediately after being identified. A plethora of tools at my fingertips that give me more control and automation than ever before. Wonderfully well done and impressive! I am looking forward to being a customer for a very long time! Massive kudos to @funkypenguin 🤟
@BSM (Discord)
"I would recommend ElfHosted to anyone. It has been great so far and made life a lot easier than running my own setups. If you’re in the fence give them a try and help support this great community."
Zestyclose_Teacher20 (Reddit)
"thanks for the help and must say this is the best host I every had for my server 🙂 10/10 🙂 All other places I have try have I got a lot buff etc. Your host can even give me full power on a 4K Remux on 200GB big movie file . That's damn awesome 😄"
@tjelite (Discord)
"What an amazing support system these guys have Chris and Layzee i think it was! Both are very patient with me even though I am a newbie at all this. Very thorough and explained everything step by step with me
I couldn’t ask for anything better than the service I have received by these guys! Happy happy client❤️"
@dead.potahto (Discord)
"Very happy customer. Great service"
@ronney67 (Discord)
"Very good customer service, frequent updates, and excelent uptime!!!!!"
@ed.guim (Discord)
"I had my own plex-arrs setup on hetzner for years. Yesterday I deleted everything as elfhosted has gone above and beyond it. And it has a fantastic, active community as well! Very friendly, helpful and like-minded folks always willing to help and improve the system. Top notch!"
@alon.hearter (Discord)
"Absolutely Amazed with the patience and professionalism of all Elf-Venger Staff including bossman penguin❤️"
@dead.potahto (Discord)
"@BSM went above and beyond to make sure I had all the one on one support needed with my sub. Thank you for your patience! Elfhosted continues to be Elftastic !!"
@bfmc1 (Discord)
"really enjoying the service from elfhosted. The setup is really easy from the guides on the website. And the help on the discord channel is really quick."
@jrhd13 (Discord)
"Support is amazing, and once you find a setup which works best for you it works perfectly, very happy 😊"
@fiendclub (Discord)
"great fast service, resolved my problem and really friendly"
@allan.st.minimum (Discord)
"Great service and sorted out a billing issue super quick and easy."
@scottcall707 (Discord)
"Very friendly support, resolved a problem with my account! I also appreciate the community that has been built around the service!"
@leo1305 (Discord)
"excellent customer service and very fast replies"
@yo.hohoho (Discord)
"Loved the simplicity, experience and support"
@y.adhish (Discord)
"Very friendly help as always, problem solved, one happy elf here!"
@badfurday0 (Discord)
"Great Helpful and Fast support. Thanks!"
@.mxrcy (Discord)