Beta phase of French cloud provider: free discourse (2GB, 4@1.3GHz)

Installation Hosting
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I asked on Twitter online_net to participate in their beta phase and got a discourse instance running (very performant) without paying so far (or even giving them credit card details). Thanks to http://online.net

Stats: C1 (4 Cores @1.3GHz, 2GB memory) + 20 GB SSD

It’s a small ARM dedicated server.

Sole disadvantage: Setup is a bit more complicated, because the docker image is not yet ARM compatible.

How-To setup docker on this cloud: https://community.cloud.online.net/t/discourse-instantapp/452

If this offer is not going to be too expensive, this could become a nice alternative to digitalocean. Especially for people that feel unconfortable to host their data in a US enterprise cloud.

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Why are you telling people to install ruby 2.0?

The Docker image has a patched ruby 2.1.2:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker/blob/master/image/base_21/Dockerfile#L42

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You need to use the official Docker image one way or another. Or

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It’s not me who wrote this manual. Probably it would not be difficult to use vanilla 2.1.0. Are the patches crucial?

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The plaform has already docker support, but they say your docker builds would not support the ARM infrastructure. Yes, it’s a mess to not use the docker image.

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Welp but the current image is x64 (and x86?) only and doesn’t support the ARMHF architecture that these servers and other stuff like raspis use.

A staffer told me they are using the same ARM server for their discourse installation too; They have a nice IRC channel.

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Hello,

what is the current statute of this project ? :slight_smile:

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I’m still running discourse for free on their beta platform.

However, installation and update of discourse is more difficult than usual,
because docker is not supported due to arm incompatibilities that we hope to
resolve sooner or later.

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Beta phase is over. May is still free (might be the case only for exsiting customers).

The regular offer is 10€ for C1 (4 Cores @1.3GHz, 2GB memory) with 20GB SSD.

Discourse 1.2.3 (last stable) is offered as a preconfigured image that is based on a patched Docker template to make it work on their arm infrastructure.

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Just to update, there is an offer of 3€ (same specs). Pretty cool to test discourse. There is a pre-made image with Discourse 1.2.3.

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But where is it, I’m not sure to find the correct link…

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By today, the offer is:

C1 Server €2.99 /month

  • 4 Dedicated ARM Cores
  • 2GB Memory
  • 50GB SSD Disk
  • 1 Reserved public IPv4
  • 200Mbit/s Unmetered bandwidth

I’m not affiliated with scaleway, but i was beta tester. My experience:

  • the discourse image is based on a custom buildscript that applies patches to make it work on ARM. An easy update is not possible and the last version (v1.2.3) is quite old already.
    https://github.com/scaleway/image-app-discourse
  • The customer support is reacting within a day or so, but do not ask them for a favour. :confused:
  • if you store backups, keep unused images, copy images etc, you pay per operation. So pay attention to always free your resources to save money.
  • Their community forum https://community.scaleway.com/ (Discourse as well) has only few active members. So people won’t be able to support your discourse experiments or custom builds.
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