This guide is intended for people who are not system administrators who just want to make Discourse work. This is a list of cloud hosting services that are believed to be reliable and easy enough for a novice to get up and running with as little fiddling as possible. You should be able to create an account, and a server on which to run your Discourse instance and still be able to pull the job off in very close to 30 minutes.
I have installed Discourse on each of these, received an email from Discourse, and used it to log in as an admin. For all of these the standard Install Cloud instructions work just fine.
What about AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud?
If you have spent many hours using bash, know what ports 80, 443, and 22 are, and are familiar with firewalls, partitions, and what an S3 bucket is, any of these will work just fine. If you have never found a solution to your problem using Stack Exchange, you should probably stay away from these providers. These are the finicky hot rods of the hosting world. This guide is to help you find something more like a Honda Civic than a Formula One racer.
What about OtherGreatService?
Easy and Reliable
The table below provides a comparison of these easy-to-use providers. The “Build time” column is the result of
time ./launcher rebuild app
It is not a meaningful benchmark, but a crude measure of how fast the CPU, Disk, and network are. Your mileage may vary. You can see, though, that the Digital Ocean “optimized” instance is nearly twice as fast as the standard 1GB one.
| Provider | Price | Disk | CPU | GB RAM | Build time | Data Centers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Digital Ocean | $6 | 25GB | 1 | 1 | 10m | US (2), NL, SG, UK, DE, CA, IN, AU |
| DO Optimized | $42 | 25GB | 2 | 4 | 5m47s | US (2), NL, SG, UK, DE, CA, IN |
| Hetzner CX22 (x86) | €3.95 | 40GB | 2 | 4 | 9m56s | DE, FI, SG, US (2) |
| Hetzner CAX11 (arm64) | €3.95 | 40GB | 2 | 4 | 5m45s | DE, FI |
| Lightsail | $10 | 30GB | 1 | 2 | 8m17s | US (3), JP, SG, AU, IN |
| Linode 1024 | $5 | 20GB | 1 | 1 | 9m46s | US (3), UK, DE, SG, JP |
| Scaleway | E10 | 10GB | 2 | 2 | ---- | FR, PL, NL |
| Upcloud | $10 | 30GB | 1 | 2 | 7m22s | DE, FI, NL, JP, UK, US |
| Vultr | $5 | 24GB | 1 | 1 | 8m | US (7), NL, FR, DE, UK, JP, SG, AU |
Note: Build times are dependent on amount of posts, plugins, and many other things. The more your site grows, the longer it will take.
Provider Notes
These are notes on individual providers. If you have good experiences with any of them, please feel free to add your comments here. If you have bad comments, please add them as a reply.
Amazon AWS/Lightsail
Pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
Super easy! Click a button to open a window with a logged-in SSH connection.
Uses ubuntu@hostname rather than root@hostname. Not what most sites do, but it’s just like AWS, and somewhat more secure.
Digital Ocean
Pricing: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
This is the simplest, easiest, and most-used provider, and since the recent price drop, it is again quite competitive. A problem for people not in the US is that they sometimes make it harder to get an account created and block outgoing SMTP ports (my standard install script works around this problem by using port 2525, which Mailgun and other providers support).
Hetzner
Pricing: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud#pricing
https://meta.discourse.org/t/hetzner-launches-a-vps-service/78759/6
Linode
https://www.linode.com/pricing
Note: Remove the too-small swap space that is automatically created. discourse-setup will create a 2gb swap file for you.
Scaleway
Accept, Credit & Debit cards and SEPA Direct Debit
Upcloud
https://www.upcloud.com/pricing/
No problems or frustrations in creating an account and cranking up a server.
Vultr
https://www.vultr.com/pricing/
Accept PayPal, Bitcoin, Alipay
I had no problems or frustrations creating an account and doing an install.
contabo.com:
Perhaps the Cheapest here: 4 cores/4GB RAM/5.80 usd+tax. (as of 10 March, 2025)
Alibaba cloud
Simple Application Server, price:
What about XXX?
If you use a provider that is easy to set up and works reliably, please feel free to leave a comment with your recommendation. Alternatively, you can edit this post to add your own experiences.
여기 메타에서 읽은 최소한의 정보만으로도 머리가 어지러울 정도예요!
