Discourse is 100% free and open source . We encourage and support an active, healthy community that accepts contributions from the public – including you!
They offer you a managed service which has a cost (of course) but you can host it yourself.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.