Discouragement of the First-Time Discourse Admin

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

@westes

Can I ask why would you ever want to host such a small group on your own hardware?

I think we have a misunderstanding, unless a VPN cloud server is “my own hardware”?

@westes

I have a background in computer security, and I can say in all honesty, I would never host my own server unless I was running something that had a guaranteed revenue of at least $1M per year.

So are you saying, basically, that nobody without a strong background in computer security should be self-hosting Discourse?

To me, either you have misinterpreted what I am doing, or you have “requirements” for somebody to be eligible for self-hosting which pretty much exclude anybody who is not running a sizeable business. I didn’t get the impression from my time on Meta that this was the profile of all self-hosters – or am I completely deluding myself here?

@westes

Paying Discourse $20/month and letting them watch the security logs, and do backups, and do upgrades, is cheap.

Rest assured that if the $20/month plan was sufficient for the needs of my community, I wouldn’t be self-hosting.

@westes

By the way, I am interested in getting a pointer to any thread you start on your FB account suspension. I run a 15K user group on FB, and they suspended my account for three weeks. During that three week period, all of my content on FB just disappeared, throwing our group into total chaos. That event alone opened my eyes that FB is a psychotic, out-of-control AI that just randomly suspends people without cause, and their backend systems for resolving such mistakes are completely dysfunctional.

Looks like exactly the same experience I went through! you can start digging around my blog with this post… enjoy the reading