Oh, I get it. What I saw was pricing for hosting.
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Unless you plan to learn about all the parts involved to run discourse, their hosted plan might actually be a good idea for you.
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It sounds complicated. Is it?
It depends on your technological skills. You should read the INSTALL documentation.
Take into account that we’re not speaking about installing a desktop application, I mean it needs a maintenance. You need to know how to manage servers and services.
For me it was easy. But I am doing linux servers and rails apps for a few years now.
you will need to learn how to run and debug
- ruby on rails apps
- postgresql
- redis
- sidekiq
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Nice, I had the same profile too. I worked on web development with Ruby on rails and systems administration for several years. 
I am not but send me an invite when it happens. 
“Complicated” is relative. I guess for me it is, not much experience with Docker, and pretty much no experience with PostGreSQL (which I believe need to run inside the Docker too).
If you run a VPS you can work that out. There are good performance servers from $2-3/month.
Not necessarily, but it is common to run everything in a container. This forum is not using containers though.
You won’t be able to run Discourse on a $3/month server.
What are the server requirements? With 4Gb RAM, Redis, and something like Wordops you can run 20 wordpress sites parallel. I prefer to start cheap and grow with the needs.
Where are you getting a 4gb ram vps for $3/month? My $5/month vps is 1gb.
Minimum requirements are low, but ruby is a ram hog: discourse/INSTALL-cloud.md at master · discourse/discourse · GitHub
You often see very good offers on https://www.lowendtalk.com . That’s where I just got a new VPS with 4Gb RAM for EUR3/month. netcup sometimes has offers too, so does Hetzner and many of the well known players. Lots of RAM you get with SSDnodes, not sure about their service though.
I was a few years with ArubaCloud, EUR 1/month for 1Gb RAM - extremely reliable and fast server. Had a few Wordpress sites and a VPN running there.
Anyway, Discourse looks good and your current server performs well. No hickups ever noted here.
One thing I like to add, I dislike moving servers. With Wordpress it’s OK, there are tools that help a lot. With a Docker and then a separate DB might be very tricky.
Upon further consideration, I may have overestimated my time and availability to start yet another project.
Not really, because docker configurations are declarative, you just move the docker file and migrate the data.
Thanks for the pointers on the VPS.
Ruby improved a lot its memory usage over the last years.
It depends more on your application and the application server used (among other things) and if discourse recommends 1-2GBs … I’d trust them 
Thanks for the info. I didn’t know about that 
$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3928 2991 128 143 808 578
Swap: 511 129 382
So pixls.us runs discourse. Cool.
Is pixls.us a paid/managed installation or are there volunteer admins who run a free and downloaded version of the codes? I assume this is a free version but…I have been wrong about things. Once or twice in the past. ;=))
Just curious. I have 25,000 posts on an aging Phorum installation. I’m looking into migrating. I have some ancient “migration” scripts I wrote, which could be adapted to a phorum to discourse plunge.
$100 dollars per month for a managed discourse installation is beyond my budget.
@darix runs our discourse installation. I believe he is also the package maintainer for discourse for suse. I also believe we are on a $40/mo linode VPS. But soon we’ll move to a $50/mo hertzner server.
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I might give it a stab. I used to be a sysadmin. For a while anyway. I do want to spend my retirement with camera and boat though, rather than with keyboard and gritted teeth.
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