I followed the tutorial below which got me up and running quickly and simply on Linode (something I was also able to do, but with much more difficulty on DigitalOcean).
Through searching on this forum I became aware of a general bias toward Digital Ocean. Notwithstanding this, getting a Discourse up nd running on Linode turned out to be more simple (perhaps only due to this concise Youtube Tutorial…)
I am agnostic about Discourse hosting providers, except that (of course in addition to value for my dollar) I lean toward any platform that can SIMPLIFY things for me as a novice dev.
I do through my research on this forum recall the Devs here generally advising in support of D.O for (perhaps among other things) potential security advantages.
Currently I am happily running a development and testing instance of Discourse on Linode (with essentially no traffic) on a 2 GB RAM and 50 GB Disk for $12.50/monthly (including their backup option), and would very much appreciate any current analysis or advisement upon which platform to deploy a production Discourse instance best optimized for (potential) scalability?
There’s no bias per-se. DigitalOcean is recommended for newcomers as it keeps the learning curve shallow. If you opt for a more complex environment then in turn you accept the added complexity it introduces, that’s all.
All of these providers scale pretty well. It really depends on the specific community and their rate of growth as to the best fit.
Linode was acquired by Akamai in early 2022. In many cases this spells doom for the smaller company in terms of service and pricing. It will happen over many years but it will undoubtedly happen.
Note how they don’t compare DO or Vultr in this calculator. This is disingenuous. They are comparing apples and oranges as the large scale cloud providers offer a ton more services as part of their offering beyond compute and storage.
I’m still looking to recommend a cloud provider that offers one click installs of popular packages like discourse and n8n. Most of them still make you do a lot of stuff manually rather than automate the install and update process completely.
Actually, I think one-clicks on pure VPS hosting providers are a bit of a curse?
If you don’t learn some of the basics during the process of installing and setting up your own instatiation of the standard install, then you are surely at greater risk not being able to understand or support your own install going forward?
One-clicks for Discourse make much more sense on managed hosting?
If you have to be a Linux system admin to install and maintain Discourse then we have lost the battle for wider adoption. I look directly at WordPress for enabling huge adoption due to their famous “5 minute” install.
The cloud providers even have started to offer WordPress as part of their managed services.
In general admin features should be built into the UI of the systems (plugin install I’m looking at you).
They won’t do it until the underlying technology improves so that all administration can be done in the UI. They are loath to take on support of these systems until it makes economic sense for them to do so. Maybe Discourse will get to critical mass to be one of the one click install deals via dockerhub. That’s where I have seen cloud providers innovate but it’s still not nearly the level of where shared hosting is.
I do it. My dashboard will create a digital ocean droplet (with plans to support other VM providers) and install there or use any capable VM that you set up and can add an ssh key to (and doesn’t have Plesk). I am not aware of a way to do an automated install on a VM that has Plesk installed.
I tend to agree with that. Most one-click installs do the installation for you, but since you didn’t do it, you don’t know how to do the basics like do a rebuild. My dashboard will do the one-click installation and also provides one-click access to command-line rebuilds and plugin installation/removal. It does everything just as you would if you were following the guidlines here, including things like managing postgres upgrades, running a cleanup to keep unused images trimmed and things like that.
You should offer your system for the hosting providers out there. And get an affiliate fee each time they have someone install discourse. I bet if they bite you’ll do really well.
My apologies if I don’t understand all the meaning of the discussion.
I just want to add that I believe that if anyone uses a 1-click install provided from a VPS (example), it’s not considered here on meta as a standard install anymore (as Robert said), and thus people on support will likely be less prone to help for free because of this. It seems important to me to consider this.
That said, in theory, an official 1-click install would be awesome of course.
Learning geekily is always the most fun, but the process of nOObification is the second-most fun.
I’ve tried installing Discourse (almost) all of the current ways – I’m currently hacking away on a cPanel method (@denvergeeks ducks for cover!) – and IMO the only truly one-click install is the click of that button…
Oh I know my way around the CLI. I have been using them since the late 1980s. I would like to suggest that the less one has to do in the CLI and more than can be done in the UI post install the better.
