I am researching running my own cloud server to learn Discourse basics. Since I have just enough UNIX admin skill to hang myself, I want to get some big picture understanding of my options.
First, what are the top hosting services for Discourse? I keep seeing the name Hetzner and I found another company Hostinger that sells a pre-installed Discourse cloud server. If there is a thread here that gives a good overview of alternate services, I would appreciate if someone could point to that.
What are my choices as far as OS goes? I see Ubuntu being used everywhere, but what about FreeBSD? What are the pros and cons of each?
Is there any hosting service that takes responsibility for upgrading both the OS and the Discourse application? I see a lot of threads here from people who upgrade just the OS and break Discourse. Unless you are doing a lot of Discourse work, this seems like a time and reliability trap for a casual admin.