Haven’t seen any formal reviews of paid discourse hosting, so here’s a brief one.
Requirements: I’m starting/helping two new forums, using Discourse for each, and chose Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting) to get the first one off the ground. They take care of updates and backups.
Price: Was first going to choose DigitalOcean’s $10 or $20 plan, but since I won’t have a ton of traffic for a while and am low on time and sysadmin experience, chose Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting)'s (aka @michaeld’s) basic plan for $20 a month. Also thought about waiting for the formal Discourse hosting option, but my needs were pretty basic.
Support: They answered my pre-sales and post-sales questions within either a couple hours or less than a day. The forum went up almost instantaneously. They have a pretty simple admin dashboard to handle DNS, but other than that you can just head straight to Discourse admin.
Overall: It’s all good so far! If you’re low on time or expertise, I’d recommend them for sure.
I am also using Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting) as my preference for running a Discourse instance.
They (except @michaeld there is another person) are very responsive, in a matter of hours (and we are in totally different timezones).
Also, they are very technical guys, so any question, from basic support to a technical issue is handled fluently. Some of those are raised here in meta as bugs/features.
Setup is very quick, you are signing to their admin panel (after payment), which is pretty basic but sufficient for most users - Ability to create instances, download last couple of days DB and resources backups, get some basic stats about the users/files in a dashboard and open a support ticket (which you can do directly by sending them an email).
So far I am very pleased, didn’t suffer any downtime in the 5 months I am using their hosting, and they’ve been able to upgrade to latest release very close to the release date. Looking forward to continue using it.
Yeah, also willing to give a shout out to Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting)
They really went the extra mile for me in helping me importing an existing forum and have quickly responded to all queries (even stupid ones on my part!) super quick.