I was finally able to get a DigitalOcean droplet up and running thanks to @pfaffman and GitHub for Education for a total of $60 in free credit to get me started. My new forum honestly has no reason to exist, but now that it does I can publish tech tutorials, talk about myself, and allow others to host temporary forums on my forum (in the form of categories).
Thanks to @pfaffman, @Falco, @cpradio, @codinghorror, and all the @staff for making Discourse a thing and helping me get mine running.
You can check out and sign up for my forum at discourse.sulliops.co!