Did we outline what “cheap” means?
I tried ti signup on OVH today to test it, but it keep saying my phone number is invalid, despite trying a bunch of different formats.
I’m running on Interserver right now at $12/mo + fixed IP. 2GB RAM. I think that’s good value to run a community on, but if I can get the same performance for less than half the cost, I’m interested to find out more
Yes, that was exactly my experience with OVH yesterday — with every telephone format I could think of ever having seen.
I’m back on Scaleway again, trying one of their Docker images (Ubuntu 16.0.4 with Docker 1.12 — actually current!). I’ll let you know how it goes.
I’m trying to contact OVH but I need an account to do so electronically. Oh the irony 
/edit NVM, found their sales email address and contacted them
The correct way to input your phone number is +[COUNTRY CODE][PHONE NUMBER] without spaces, parenthesis, dashes or brackets. For example, OVH support office’s own phone number is +18556845463. Do you require more assistance? I will gladly assist you further.
I feel fairly certain that that was perhaps the second or third permutation that I tried; possibly not, however.
In the meantime, I can report I successfully have Discourse v1.7.0.beta10 +42 running on Docker 1.12 on Ubuntu 16.0.4 on a Scaleway VC1S server in Amsterdam, at €2.99/month. For my needs (~10 users), this is perfect. 
Why why why.
How much time would it take to accept and silently discard spaces, parentheses, dashes, or brackets? (Or dots or other non-digits.)
“Be conservative in what you produce and liberal in what you accept”, or however the motto goes.
I can never fathom why it could be a good idea to have strict rules on acceptable input format (e.g. “credit card numbers MUST have spaces after every four digits” or “MUST NOT have spaces” etc.
If you’re accepting input from the general, non-technical public (rather than from an API endpoint), wouldn’t it be more accommodating to be a bit more permissive? Also makes it easier to copy-paste information that may be in a different format (e.g. phone numbers: 1.855.684.5463 or 1-855-684-5463 or +1 (855) 684-5463 etc.
It’s still pretty unambiguous what is meant. Why can’t the computer do the format massaging for you?
Or at least add verbiage to the form about the correct format.
That would help a little.
But I still feel that it’s pushing the work of getting the format just right onto the thousands of users who will use the form rather than doing it once, at the source.
But at least that’s better than forms that tell you after you’ve submitted that you made a “mistake”… but will only tell you one mistake at a time. So after you correct that and re-submit, then it tells you about the second form field that it’s not happy with.
It sounds like they don’t want your money.
No kidding, I’m putting in my DOB and it now says “subscribe_minimum_18_years_old”
Workaround… Leave the year field blank.
Can you Please tell me your experience with Scaleaway. Are they able to host fully functional discourse based on the requirements?
Hi, @kudos, thanks for asking!
Yes, Scaleway “Starter Cloud Server” at €2.99/month does in fact meet the minimum requirements for running a small- to mid-sized Discourse forum, and it really comes with a 50 SSD. They have data centers in Amsterdam and Paris; mine worked fine in Amsterdam (which I chose for faster ping-times from my home in the northeast U.S.), but I’m sure Paris would be fine, too.
Account setup, IP setup, Docker installation, and Discourse implementation went smoothly. I migrated (my small amount of) data from several previous forums without a hitch. I was able to make Discourse backups, download them, upload them again, and restore also with no problems.
That said, I found it to be a little sluggish. For my small Discourse setup, I found Hetzner’s vServer CX10 at €3.90/month to be a little more responsive, despite the lower specs. This might be partly due to lower latency (again, for me in the northeastern U.S.), but Discourse app rebuild times, for example, were several times faster than those at Scaleway — and obviously latency doesn’t figure into that at all.
Because I’m actually hosting two Discourse sites, I’ve ended up using Hetzner’s vServer CX20 at €6.90/month. This specs out identically to Scaleway’s minimal system, but is (as expected) even more responsive than Hetzner’s CX10.
Thank you Erik I did not know Scaleway. The 2.99€/month offer is based on ARM cores, which may perhaps explain the sluggishness.
Actually, @blaumeer, though Scaleway’s “baremetal” machines are ARM, I had a “starter cloud” VPS, which is x86 based — and also €2.99. These are just a little further down the page that I linked to.
Sorry, only the C1 is ARM, C2 is x64. Very slow x64 but x64.
Yes, you’re right, @zsero. The cheapest BareMetal is ARM, the others are x64.
But my point was that I was not referring to their BareMetal servers at all, but rather to their Starter Cloud Servers.
The Starter Cloud Servers are all x64; they are what would be appropriate for running Docker and Discourse on; and I was using the least expensive of them. It was slow, but it worked without problems for me.
But as I mentioned earlier in the thread, I left Scaleway and have (very happily) been using a Hetzner CX20.
Thanks for the Hetzner CX20 tip. I’m going that way. Hesistated with LeaseWeb M which is slightly more expensive. I preferred hosting in Germany though, where privacy law is a slight bit better than in NL.
Hello,
Do you want a native docker hosting (without managing your VPS)? You can try Hidora, they are based in Switzerland (data privacy law) and they use Jelastic as orchestrator. With Jelastic, you pay only for what you consume.
It’s nice!