The discussion revolves around choosing between Digital Ocean’s $15 and $20 plans for hosting a Discourse community. meglio shares a comparison of the two plans, noting that the $15 option has 3GB of memory, while the $20 option has 2 vCPUs. They’re currently hosting a 2300-member community on the $20 plan and wonder if downgrading to the $15 plan would be beneficial.
mpalmer suggests identifying the current bottleneck before making a decision, while jcoates recommends starting with the cheaper option and upgrading when necessary.
meglio believes their bottleneck is budget and shares their Digital Ocean dashboard stats. codinghorror advises that multiple CPUs are mostly about concurrent requests, and dropping to 1 CPU could be a fine tradeoff if CPU usage is low.
codinghorror suggests looking at the CPU graph to determine if a single CPU is sufficient, while erlend_sh recommends exploring monetization options to alleviate budget concerns.
Overall, the discussion highlights the importance of understanding one’s specific use case and monitoring performance metrics before making decisions about resource allocation.
So, we’re currently hosting our 2300 members community at the $20/mo option. All is good and is pretty fast. Pageviews are between 200k and 500k / month, depending on the season.
Now, would I benefit moving to the $15/mo option to get more memory? Will downgrading the number of CPUs from 2 to 1 damange performance considerably? I somewhere read Jeff Atwood’s comments about CPU speed being much more important for Discourse than the number of CPUs.
Any comments? Any recommendations? Discourse team, you should know about it the most. Please give some insight.
Usually, the best plan is to go as cheap as you can then upgrade whenever you hit a limit (CPU, storage, or transfer). Resizing droplets is really easy, so unless you need more of something, save yourself $5-10 bucks a month until you do.
Multiple CPUs is mostly about concurrent requests. So if you don’t tend to have a lot of active logged in users at the same time – if your CPU usage is low overall – dropping down to 1 CPU and increasing memory (more cache, etc) could be a fine tradeoff.
A proposito, considerando quanto sia di successo la tua comunità e il valore che porta ai suoi partecipanti, dovresti davvero prendere in considerazione la possibilità di monetizzarla tramite Patreon, una sezione a pagamento o qualcosa di simile. Crea un nuovo argomento in Community Building se vuoi parlarne ulteriormente.
