There’s plenty of options and it depends on what you’re after. I started off trying to get Discourse to work on cheap OpenVZ, failed at that, moved to OVH cloud (running ESXI virtualization). After this I built my own esxi rig and started a lot of different experiments. I ended up coming back to the OpenVZ problem and came up with the ddmb script which was success, but still don’t recommend it.
If you want to keep support with the developers then you’ll need docker with aufs. If you want managed hosting it seems your options are
- discourse.org
- Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting)
- prodiscourse.com
If you want a VPS with support there’s many VPS/dedi that will install docker with aufs. Most commonly mentioned are digitalocean and runabove. I think DO is fair, but perhaps a little pricey. My experience with runabove was mixed. I liked the interface, and the discounts gave me free hosting, but it was stalling out in responsiveness too often in the shell for me to think it could handle an app in production with reliability. It seems this may have been an issue when they were still in beta, and may have since been addressed. Some people seem to be happy with RA.