Web Panel provides remote backups, restores, and reconfigurations of mail or hostname
Standard plugins with all packages, premium plugins on deluxe, and custom plugins on professional
##FREE STARTER COMMUNITIES!!
Sign up for a free starter community and get your forums deployed in under 5mins. We give you a half year to enjoy the experience of Discourse software with our hosting solution and decide for yourself if it’s worth it for you to pony up.
Sure. Sign up on site. No credit card necessary. It has enough resources for tiny communities to try out the software I figure 6 months is plenty for a community to grow and prosper, else peter out. That’s what is offered.
If your community is successful, and you would like to continue to be hosted with ProDiscourse, then you can upgrade to a paid plan within your web management panel at the click of a button
Free plans do have limited resources, and don’t come with plugins, SSL or remote backup/restore, but it has all the basics that you get from Discourse out of the box.
and make suggestions within the plugin category. My main concerns are plugins that either are not fully compatible with 1.3 stable, else will take too much memory for users to grow their communities as they’d like. Besides that, I’m all for people being able to pick more plugins for their own communities, and if they turn out to have no memory leaks, or have instabilities, then am all for adding it to package lists.
aside from SSD size, what are the differences? Also how is the pro package still cheaper than the lowest option at Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting) - just trying to understand, maybe you can explain some of the technical approaches, I don’t know so much about infrastructure…
Hey sebastian. There are some differences from Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting), and ProDiscourse, though to get all those details you might have to ask the same question with them. I’m not certain exactly how they operate their package tiers. I’d rather @michaeld explain his company while I’ll stick to my own.
I think he would say we’re both offering SaaS, and I have come to accept this terminology. We both offer Discourse as a service. With ProDiscourse, you get a shared hosted environment and your instance is held within a docker container. You get the ability to change your hostname, mail settings, and upgrade packages or cancel anytime from a web management panel.
The packages have the following (for techies)
Value is set at 1.25gb memory
Deluxe is set at 1.75gb memory
Professional is set at 2.5gb memory
Proportionately, you could say the value gets 2vcore, deluxe gets 3vcore, and professional gets 4vcore, but in reality all will have equal shares until the hosts become saturated and start running hot during peak hours.
Well there you have memory, cpu shares, and SSD figured out. Another thing I should mention is that all paid packages include SSL with a subdomain of prodiscourse. That’s another perk I thought would be nice for all customers.
Good question. I should make it clear exactly which limitations/restrictions there are.
Outside of performance and capacity, you will miss out on SSL, plugins, and remote backups/restores. You still get a full fledged Discourse to try out. It’s totally risk free to try out, but I would suggest caution before putting an already established community which has a large member base on it. You may find performance reduction off the bat! It’s for starter communities to try out, though you’re free to go at it if you like.
Ok great. The unspoken question I had was, whether the free pack also allowed for custom domain name and migrations. Speaking of those, your FAQ mentions those are free? From what I understand, getting some non-discourse community migrated to Discourse could well tie up a smart geek for the better part of a day…
Right, we’d have to speak of this in private. I’ve not done a single migration yet outside of discourse on one server to the next. Doing a SQL migration from one forum software to another seems to take a bit of experience to master. Part of the reason why I’m advertising for free now is to gain the experience, and cause it very well could take me some time to get the first dozen or so done successfully. You can’t complain about it taking some time if it’s free So that’s the honest truth. Custom domain name is still free. That remains an easy option from within the web management panel.
well let me know if you’re interested in practicing with a rather legacy SMF install that’s been dead for a while. Would be interested in seeing that one migrated and whether discourse might help breathe new life into it, others I have are even larger… so those aren’t good for experimenting
I figure 6 months is plenty for a community to grow and prosper, else peter out. That’s what is offered.
So that’s the honest truth. Custom domain name is still free. That remains an easy option from within the web management panel.