Absolutely understand the support issue - I just wish I had updated the Discourse version before trying lots of other things. I only realised it wasn’t the latest version when I had given up and opened a digitalocean account. Happy to say it works as expected now.
Regarding the comment about Frez’s instructions; it’s not a criticism, they are not step by step instructions but are more akin to a top level guide, not suitable to a novice as you cannot follow them explicitly. It would be a considerable amount of work (and then support) to change them into full step by step instructions.