Digital Ocean $15 vs $20, what is a better option for Discourse?

Product Support Self-hosting

AI-generated summary

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.

1

Digital Ocean is a recommended provider for Discourse self-hosting.

It recently introduced a $15 / mo plan. Compare it to $10 and $20 plans that were there and are still an option:

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It is interesting that the $15 option has 3GB Memory, which is +1GB compared to the $20 option. Vice-versa, $20/mo has 2 vCPUs.

Not considering the SSD Disk in this comparison, because likely you’re going to add Block Storage for image hosting anyway, which comes at $10/100GB price.

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.

2

What’s your current bottleneck? Without knowing that, it’s impossible to say which dimension needs to be expanded.

3

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.

4

I believe my bottleneck is the budget. The forum itself has been running smoothly so far.

I’m trying to understand whether I can go down from $20 to $15.

In the same time, it’s interesting what would be the best choice for a Discourse setup when comparing the $15 and $20 options.

Talking about my use-case, here is the stats form the Digital Ocean dashboard for last 30 days:

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5

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.

6

It’s up to 30 users accessing the website simultaneously. Is it “a lot” or not really for a single CPU in terms of processing requests to Discourse?

7

Again you can just look at your CPU graph, why ask me this question when you can look at the data.

8

Como nota al margen, considerando lo exitosa que es tu comunidad y el valor que aporta a sus participantes, realmente deberías considerar monetizarla con Patreon, una sección con muro de pago o algo similar. Crea un nuevo tema para ello en Community Building si quieres hablar más sobre el tema.