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Tools

HomeTools

Not a marketplace. These are platforms and utilities we mention in articles. Follow the vendor link; nothing here is sold by Styles Factory.

Platform

  • XenForo

    Self-hosted forum software. Strong permissions, styles, and add-on ecosystem.

  • Invision Community

    Suite-style community platform: forums, blogs, commerce, pages, and clubs.

Hosting

  • Cloudflare

    CDN, DNS, and WAF in front of a self-hosted forum. Keep Rocket Loader off.

  • Hetzner / similar VPS

    Typical home for a dedicated XenForo or IPS box when shared hosting is too tight.

Email

  • Amazon SES

    Transactional mail for registrations, watches, and 2FA. Pair with SPF/DKIM/DMARC.

  • Postmark

    Transactional email with clear deliverability tooling if you do not want SES.

Analytics

  • Plausible

    Lightweight analytics that does not fight a privacy-conscious community.

  • Matomo

    Self-hosted analytics when the data has to stay on your own server.

Auth

  • Keycloak

    Self-hosted IdP when the forum must speak OIDC/SAML to the rest of the stack.