Self-hosters what has your experience been?

[Architect]

@forummaster

• On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the greatest level of difficulty managing a Discourse instance, what would you rate it?

About four, for the initial setup install and managing that is kind of a vague question you ask. Once site is fully setup there isn’t too much to manage on the technical side other that updating and configuring settings, but there can be a lot more work to manage a site with a lot of people would become more difficult potentially.

• If I ever need to migrate my Discourse instance to another VPS, is this a fairly seamless process, or is it problematic?

Haven’t done that.

• What are the most common problems you run into with self-hosting?

The initial install process was a little challenging for me since have no background in ever installing anything by command line, but eventually figured that out.

Second main challenge is the e-mail sending/receiving setup.

I preferred the discourse hosting with discoursemail and team support is very helpful, but for new site with not a lot of traffic don’t need that and is more affordable to self-host with $12 a month server is less than the $100 a month standard plan.

However, have spent a lot of time figuring out how to make this work, so if you value your time a lot then discourse hosting may in fact be less expensive than managing the server yourself.