I’m not saying that self-hosting Discourse requires deep expertise in computer security as such. But when I read something like this:
that does raise a red flag for me.
Not because there’s anything wrong with getting help, but because it suggests a setup where ongoing access and responsibility depend on one specific person’s availability. In that situation, a hosted solution is often a better fit. You still wouldn’t need to log into the server yourself, but you’d have a reliable party to fall back on, rather than relying on goodwill, spare time, or on that one person being available when something goes wrong. In much the same way that you can’t rely on Facebook as a long-term guarantee, we’ve seen entire communities fail simply because the one person holding the keys stopped answering the phone.
In practice, it’s precisely at the moment something breaks and that person becomes unavailable that people end up coming to us (or to Jay, or to CDCK), though perhaps I’m just preaching to my own choir here.
But I might be deviating from the actual subject here. I think @philh says it better than I could ever have
Baby steps. It doesn’t have to be perfect immediately. Actually, nobody knows what “perfect” is for your specific community. You and your community will figure it out along the way. And if you get hindered by the lack of knowledge about how to do something, or maybe even about what possibilities there are, meta is the perfect place to ask, and I am not aware of any other product with such a great community that people can rely on.