I am new to discourse and trying to setup for my own forum. I have a webserver running Linux and WHM/Cpanel which has worked out fine for my wordpress websites. I ran up a new server which I was going to host the new website and the discourse install based on that website (will be a main website for the brand, with wp discourse plugin installed with a link to the forum on the site). All seemed to be going well until the certificates and auto ssl (could not find the private keys easily). I read that it was not a good idea to run certbot and WHM’s Auto SSL on the same machine. So I moved the website off to another WHM server and started from scratch with a new Alma Linux with WHM and got it all working with discourse running, then realised WHM wasn’t really needed. My issue is I am not well versed on Linux and although I think I can get it installed on the standalone machine (withouth WHM) I am not really sure I am well versed enough on Linux to lock the machine down and on going maintenance of backing up, monitoring disk usage etc. I really need a GUI and feel slighted freaked out going without one. Long story but I wanted to give background and also ask what other people are using to run docker and discourse. From searching online it seems to be Ubuntu, though I could be wrong. I want to have a GUI, software to backup and be able to restore quickly and easily in the event of a disaster, checking diskspace, monitoring, etc. Is Ubuntu the way to go and will it handle being able to run a large discourse site? I know hardware will have a lot to do with this but just wanted to check. I mean if hypothetically I ended up with 100,000 users or more will Ubuntu be stable? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I would go with Ubuntu. This is what Discourse recommends. The standard install guide (discourse/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub) says that: The default of the current supported LTS release of Ubuntu Server works fine. At minimum, a 64-bit Linux OS with a modern kernel version is required. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself, you can go with a Discourse hosted plan or with another Discourse host (e.g. Communiteq).

Thanks very much NateDhaliwal. I will go with Ubuntu. Unfortunately, I want to have the forum with my own domain name and as it is a new website, I don’t want to have to spend the money on the hosted tier that allows for that. If the website and forum go well I will definately change over. Just as a side note I wonder if you know if it is possible to go from self hosted discourse to hosted. Would it be as simple as backing up the file on the self hosted and restoring to hosted?

I think so. On the Pricing page, that question is in their FAQ.

Great thank you! Thanks for your help again. :slight_smile:

[image] becl: I really need a GUI and feel slighted freaked out going without one. A long time ago, I felt the same way. Eventually, you begin to feel differently. You begin to feel the control a Linux OS gives you as far as what you want to load on the system, how you want it to work and the freedom from closed source software. You learn to use command line tools intuitively and you begin to feel like you can ‘see’ the system much better then any GUI will afford. No hard evidence, no tips or advise. Just a story about my own experiences

Thanks Andrew. Actually the thing that I am most freaked out about is backup and restore in a disaster situation. The server is virtual so I can’t do an ISO image. I’m not really sure the best way to backup and then restore from scratch. I’m used to GUI style backups and restores. I was looking at rclone and restic but they seemed complicated. I want to test the whole disaster situation with a server running discourse, break it and test the plan works before I start configuring discourse for my forum.

You can usually take snapshots, but it depends on what the hosting offers. It’s easy to backup and restore in Discourse. See Create, download, and restore a backup of your Discourse database. You can reinstall Discourse anytime and restore a backup. Also worth to read: Best Practices for Backups.

Hi Arkshine, Thanks so much for the best practises link. I don’t think my hosting offers snapshots. I will ask them. I would really like to cut down the time having to reinstall the entire server with all the settings again, in the event of a disaster.

Operating System - Ubuntu, Linux or something else?

Product Support Self-hosting

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) March 9, 2025, 9:21pm 10

All you need is the yml file and to have backups on s3, configured in the yml file.

Spin up a new server, clone discourse, copy the yml file, rebuild, and then restore the backup from s3.

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Operating System - Ubuntu, Linux or something else?

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