A user, Marco_Raballo, is considering installing Discourse through GoDaddy hosting and sought expert and user opinions. However, the majority of users advised against it due to potential issues with the Bitnami install, which is old and unsupported with security problems, as mentioned by Falco. mitchellk and michaeld also shared their negative experiences with GoDaddy hosting.
Marcos_Raballo then considered Amazon hosting, but mpalmer pointed out that the available Discourse version on Amazon is also outdated. On the other hand, JagWaugh and Falco suggested alternative approaches to installing Discourse on Amazon, such as using a Ubuntu AMI or Amazon LightSail, which they found to be working solutions. thephotographyblog added that GoDaddy’s cPanel-based VPS may not support Discourse’s required technologies.
I already have GoDaddy’s service hired for email and Webflow webpage hosting and wanted an expert and user opinion on implementing this install. Every input would be appreciated, i already know using digital ocean would be a more accurate choice, but i want to give it a try and optimize already allocated resources.
The general idea would be to implement Discourse’s forum platform as a sub-domain to my already existing Webflow webpage (Hosted by GoDaddy). Im sorry in advance if i have some concept errors, not my field of expertise.
Then give it a try. It’s not that hard to move from one provider to another, just back up the old site, download it, upload it to the new one and restore it there.
I would avoid GoDaddy for hosting, they cannot even seem to provide a proper wordpress platform to their users as they took wordpress and fiddled with it to fit within their messy system, go read their user communities. I am a long time GD customer but only for domain name purchases and nothing else.
Yes, if it’s using Bitnami, it’s problematic. Specifically:
Latest Version 1.5.3-1-r28
That’s quite an old version of Discourse. There’s a lot of new hawtness available, and a number of quite critical security bugs fixed, that you’d be missing out on using that version.
For Amazon I just used a Ubuntu (16.04) AMI and followed the install cloud instructions. Works fine for testing with a free tier, I ended up going to more ram and increased the disk space, but the sandbox install I am working with is 1.8 Million posts, and 40K user accounts.
The new Amazon LightSail also works with Discourse, I tested myself. The price is bad, you get more performance from a same price Digital Ocean droplet, but it does work.
I don’t even think you can install it because their VPS is cPanel based, which means that they probably don’t support Discourse’s required technologies.
