First of all I should express my gratitude for such a lovely platform. I enjoyed using Discourse every moment and I wish moving to another platform is not the only option. We have a small brewing community in Turkey, at craftbeertr.com and we have been using discourse happily for the last 3-4 years. Although we have ~500 users, the number of active users is much smaller, but lots of people follow and learn from the forum without starting a membership. We try to stay independent and therefore have to share the expenses among a very small group of people and as our money had lost a great deal of its value to foreign currencies, it become a little expensive for us to maintain our expenses. Hence, I thought moving to another platform might be a solution with keeping the identities. As a newbie forum admin I do not have the slightest idea whether this would be possible or not. I Googled but couldn’t find something useful. Maybe this is not the right place to ask this but I couldn’t come up with a better idea. Any recommendations to solve this dilemma? We are using Ocean servers… Any cheaper options possible? Will it be possible to decrease the cost if we try to keep using Discourse? Which platform will you suggest? Apologies in advance if this is not the topic you want to be in this forum. Thank you very much for your help.

[image] Boğaç Erkan: Any recommendations to solve this dilemma? We are using Ocean servers… Any cheaper options possible? Will it be possible to decrease the cost if we try to keep using Discourse? What is your budget for hosting and what’s your rough spend on Digital Ocean? It’s possible that you can get by with smaller servers that what you’re using.

what about self hosting from your house? what’s your internet like? i self host a bunch of stuff from a ‘hyper-converged’ machine in my basement.

This might be your low cost solution - running it at your home with a raspi and your own internet - [image] Discourse on a Raspberry Pi Running a production instance of Discourse in a $35 Raspberry Pi 4

Hetzner or Contabo?: [image] Contabo vs. Hetzner vs. Linode vs. Digital Ocean for Discourse Hosting Under $30/mo Self-hosting I have Discourse instances on 4 different shared-cloud hosting services at the moment, for testing: (These screenshots are as of 2023-05-14) Contabo for $27/month: [contabo-pricing] Hetzner for $27/month: [hetzner-pricing] Linode for $24/month: [linode-pricing] Digital Ocean for $24/month: [digital-ocean-pricing] Thus far the installation experience is about the same on Linode and Hetzner. Digital Ocean’s “One Click” Discourse installer isn’t very helpful in my opinion. I haven’t …

Hi, I visited your forum, nice job. :clap: You can try AWS EC2 with Reserved Instances + upront payment. For emails try AWS SES. And also if you add Adsense ads on your forum you can get some income for expenses.

Thank you very much for all your feedback @supermathie, @shyguy, @anderer, @merefield and @ufukayyildiz. Wow, it seems there’s a lot I need to learn. Believe or not, I thought when we use Discourse we have to host at Ocean. We are using Ocean’s cheapest option, as far as I know, and it’s something like $14. I am aware that this is not a big amount for you guys but it’s not cheap for us people living in Turkey. I’ll dig into your comments at the first inconvenience and start investigating the options you stated. @ufukayyildiz, thank you very much for your nice words mate. Have you registered? :slight_smile: Thank you very much for each one of you. Best wishes from Ankara.

[image] Boğaç Erkan: I thought when we use Discourse we have to host at Ocean. No! We pick that as our example as it’s an accessible option for a lot of people and we know the servers are of the right type. Any VM provider that provides a full virtual server (i.e. not a jailed or containered environment) should work. Do you have any suggestions for the install guide to make this clearer?

we have one discourse running at “home” on server/raspi with a very fast internet and one running at strato - where it is 1 euro per month - when we had 100 users at the very same time on our site then it was noticeably slower - but in all other cases the 1 euro solution worked perfectly. and for email you might use gmail (see this forum) or maybe your current plan where you get your domain from provides smtp already for you.

Thank you very much for all these nice suggestions. We have funds for the next couple of months and I will spend the beginning of my retirement days reading about how to organize these changes. I am glad that I had asked.

[image] Michael Brown: Do you have any suggestions for the install guide to make this clearer? I am sorry but couldn’t understand what you mean. If you are asking whether I have an easy guide for a new installation, I thought I will find the guidance in this forum. :slight_smile:

Moving to Another VPS Provider

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supermathie (Michael Brown) June 16, 2023, 11:30pm 2

What is your budget for hosting and what’s your rough spend on Digital Ocean?

It’s possible that you can get by with smaller servers that what you’re using.

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