Originally published at: Free Hosting for Open Source v2
Nearly two years ago we started very carefully experimenting with free hosting of open source projects. Today we’re announcing the next iteration of our free hosting program, casting a much wider net this time. Free Discourse Hosting For Your Open Source Project Do you run a popular open source project? Then you might be eligible…
AI-generated summary
erlend_sh announces the second iteration of Discourse’s free hosting program for open source projects, expanding eligibility criteria. To qualify, projects must have at least 10 contributors and demonstrate a clear need for large-scale discussions, such as crowded issue trackers or active user advice seeking. The program offers a subdomain on *.discourse.group, free SSL, and a bandwidth limit of 50k monthly page views. Notably, custom domains are no longer supported under the free plan, and the team does not support importing existing content from other platforms. However, jomaxro clarifies that users can perform manual imports using open-source scripts on a local development site and then submit a backup for restoration by the Discourse team. erlend_sh confirms that legacy V1 projects will retain their existing terms and domains. In the discussion, codinghorror credits erlend_sh for driving the initiative. Questions arise regarding plugin availability; spdegabrielle asks about the official calendar plugin, but jomaxro states it is not available on the free tier currently, though it may be evaluated for future inclusion. tobiaseigen confirms that social logins like GitHub and Google work on the free subdomains. James_Pilgrim reports a broken link to the application form, which chapoi and pmusaraj confirm was due to a domain name being accidentally taken, and the issue is now resolved. Finally, AJHalili2006 asks about upgrading an existing free instance to the Pro for Open Source plan, with supermathie advising to email the team for options.
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How will this affect communities in the V1 program?
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Projects on the legacy plan will continue to be hosted under the terms that applied when they signed up, meaning they will not need to change their domain names.
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This is incredible!!! Thanks so much @erlend_sh and Discourse team!!!
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All credit to @erlend_sh he has been driving this forward!
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@erlend_sh We’d like to move Gitcoin to use the free version possible. Does this allow for a custom domain? If not, how do we qualify for the 50% off?
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The free plan no longer allows for custom domains. The 50% discount is generally for not-for-profit open source projects, which puts Gitcoin in a bit of a grey area. But since it literally exists for the purpose of supporting open source that tips the scale in your favour 
I’ll send you a PM to discuss specifics.
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When you say you can’t help import existing mailing lists and the like, does that mean it’s still possible for us to do it manually or only if we self-host? We have 17 years of mailing lists to not lose and we’re really not trying to self host anything anymore
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You can absolutely do it yourself. All our import scripts are open source, so you can set up a local dev site and run the import. From there, you can take a backup of your dev site, upload it to your free hosted site, and shoot us an email. We’ll work with you to restore the backup.
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Awesome, guess I know what I’ll be doing this weekend 
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Are you sure? The opening post explicitly says:
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Yes, I’m quite sure . We will not assist with imports, but we’re happy to restore a Discourse backup, whether that backup is from an import, another hosting site, self-hosting, etc.
Let me see if I can edit the copy there a bit to be clearer.
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FAQ in the linked blog post updated.
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Hello 
This is unclear to me why allow_restore parameter is disabled in these opensource discourses.
Although it looks natural that no support is provided for custom imports requiring ssh-ing the server and doing the technical work, moving from old.discourse.example.org to new.discourse.group is basically a file save/open operation requiring no technical knowledge. Am I missing something?
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Restore is disabled across our entire hosting. Free, standard, business, enterprise, everything. This has nothing to do with our open source hosting. We handle restores for our customers, even the free ones, for security and support reasons.
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Ah OK thank you @jomaxro, the reason wasn’t clear to me.
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Just setting up one of these. We want to enable logging in by github, twitter and google. Is this going to be possible and can we set it up in the usual way? Or is this something discourse would be able to do for us because it’s on your discourse.group domain?
If I recall correctly, setting up the apps on one or more of these requires authenticating with the TLD.
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Which one?
We have plenty of users using social logins under discourse.group. First site I tested is using GitHub and Google.
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OK, cool! Thanks for confirming. I haven’t done many of these and tend to forget steps I haven’t performed in a while. I will take a look and get back to you if I run into any trouble.
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Thank you team! It looks like this is also available from the Admin panel. Sorry for the newbie question, and thank you very much for your help!
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