Which server to choose regarding Discourse requirements?

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AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around choosing the right server for Discourse requirements. Canapin is considering two OVH VPS Cloud offers: a dual-core 3.1 GHz with 4 GB RAM and a dual-core 2.4 GHz with 12 GB RAM, both for 19€/month. codinghorror suggests opting for the VPS SSD 3, which is cheaper (15€/month) and has a dual-core 2.4 GHz with 8 GB RAM, as long as the CPU is fairly modern (2015 or later).

Canapin is also considering hosting two Discourse installations in the future, with varying message and member counts. codinghorror and SouperC advise starting with a lower-end package and upgrading as needed, as OVH servers can handle Discourse installations without issues, especially if the CPU is fast. SouperC notes that disk space can be a concern, but this can be managed by storing backups efficiently.

1

Hi.
I’m going to buy a VPS Cloud 2 from OVH, and they have two offers:

dual-core 3,1 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB, 19€/month
dual-core 2,4 GHz, 12 GB RAM, 50GB, 19€/month

My server will not contain only a Discourse installation (150000 messages and 3000 users migrated from PHPBB, I think a few dozen messages will be written each day), but also a variable number of small Wordpress websites, and 1 larger which will be using WP-Discourse.

Any suggestion about the offer that would suit my needs?

edit: I didn’t see that there is also the VPS SSD 3: dual-core 2,4 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 40GB SSD, 15€/month, which is cheaper and maybe more suitable?

2

You definitely want SSD, the last one seems fine, just check and see if it is a fairly modern CPU.

3

Hi, thanks for your reply. Strangely, I can’t find the CPU model on their site…

4

You’d need to email their support, probably. As long as it is a CPU from 2015 or later (released in the last 3 years) you should be fine.

5

Thank you.

A last question:
It is possible that I would have to host 2 discourse installations in the future.
The first one with 150000 messages and 3000 members, but I don’t know how many visits per day. In terms on postd message, I think a few dozen each days as I said.
The other one would be 200000 messages and 7000 members, with twice as more messages per day. Don’t know how many visits per day either.

Do you think a dual core with 8 GB RAM will be enough, or do you strongly advice a quad core?

7

Start with your best guess low end package and upgrade/add more resources as you need to. You can’t downgrade though.

We’re on OVH. Small community, 2.5k/reads a day. But I will say that even the lowest spec OVH server barely broke a sweat in terms of CPU. 3-5%. RAM is always maxed but that’s the nature of the OS.

One thing to note, Discourse likes fast CPUs over number or cores.

The main problem I had was insufficient disk space, that was because I stored too many backups on there. Rookie error :joy: