Discourse hosting on Linode?

[Jimrea]

What a great detailed post @khenmu.

@khenmu

I’m not sure about the “less expensive” bit, though.

I think I really meant “not significantly more expensive”.

For starters, let me say that I have no connection with Communiteq other than as a customer. I don’t know anyone there, and I know nothing about their business.

My knowledge is probably a bit out of date. I did the comparison back in 2016, and once I picked Communiteq I didn’t really keep up with competing options. If the cheapest $6 option provided by Digital Ocean is enough to host Discourse then that is less expensive, back in 2016 it seemed that a $20/month DO plan was required, and Communiteq was also $20/month.

@khenmu

For email I chose Sendinblue which offer 300 free emails per day. This might not be enough for all communities, but it is definitely sufficient for smaller communities.

Our community averages less than 300 emails per day, but goes over that number on a regular basis.

@asirota

Free email? I would never trust a company that doesn’t charge for email or have it as a paid option. That service level will always be worse (go to spam blacklisted etc) than a dedicated service like sendinblue, mailgun or sendgrid.

I’m not sure if that comment was directed at my post or @khenmu. As for Communiteq, I wouldn’t say they offer “free email”, rather, it’s bundled with the hosting service. I can’t send any email thru their service other than what comes out of the forum (we use mailgun for our regular transactional emails). I’m not sure if they host it themselves or use a dedicated service, but in six years we’ve had ZERO email delivery problems, which is just what I was looking for. Having run my own email server for over 15 years that’s not something I ever want to be involved with again.

@khenmu

For Akismet, I made the assumption the forum is not commercial

My forum is commercial, so I think that would be $10/month (or $8.33 if billed annually).

@khenmu

so your guess is as good as mine

I have no idea, but we’ve had no problem with performance. Our forum has about a thousand members with about 30k pageviews per month.

@khenmu

This includes more than double the storage offered by Communiteq.

After six years, we’re only using less than a tenth of what Communiteq provides.

@khenmu

particularly given that every plan of theirs appears to include access to a support team, who naturally need to be paid.

In six years I’ve only communicated with their support team 3 or 4 times, but each time the responses have been prompt and helpful.

@khenmu

They also curiously claim to be based in the EU and yet omit VAT from their prices (is that legal?).

I think they are in Denmark? When we started with them I think that was the only choice. I am in the US and have no idea about VAT.

The original post on this thread was about using a $12.50/month Linode plan. Add Askimet for $10/month and that’s already more expensive then Communiteq, even if you use free email. So I definitely think Communiteq is competitive on pricing. Perhaps less so if a $6 DO plan will do the job.

Again, I have zero connection with Communiteq. If anyone’s interested, my forum is at forum.provue.com (main web site at www.provue.com).

@khenmu

Pros and cons… no right answer.