I’m working on a new domain and I think about to use discourse as forum software.
On other domains I use Woltlab and Vanilla … but discourse is getting more and more popular.
How is this forum hosted itself, self-hosted on a VPS or as paid service?
https://payments.discourse.org/buy/
So what are the bigger forums doing, do they pay the SaaS to avoid the administration trouble
or do they maintain their own servers?
Discourse has pretty beefy hardware requirements, with a minimum 1GB of RAM and recommended 2GB. So it won’t work on shared hosting.
Then the only installation method they support is with Docker, so that adds more requirements.
You’ll have to decide on what you’d rather spend: money or time. DigitalOcen has compatible machines for $20/month, while the smallest Discourse plan is $100/month. That’s almost a difference of $1000/year.
I guess if you’re doing server administration already, then adding one more wouldn’t be a big hassle. Otherwise the hosted option could end up being cheaper.
@mpaluchowski - thank you very much!
+1 for DigitalOcean. I’ve got a Discourse up on there and it’s much more cost effective than AWS - while our community is small (<100 users, with ~25 active), our post index is huge, as the forum dates back 15+ years (150k posts). The specs for the money at DO made a lot of sense.
I find Discourse with its Javascript sickness rather disturbing, especially since its structure (categories are not the default view…?) makes it incredibly hard to find what you’re looking for.
I don’t get the hype and I hope it will be over soon.
I’d also prefer a lighter forum theme, that would likely give a smoother and quicker browsing experience.