we just bought the website: wer-weiss-was.de which is based on discourse. The site has 400K Users and round about 1 Mio uniques per month.
Our problem now is that the server costs are unusually high round about 2500€ per month ( curretly the project is hosted on AZURE, the most expensive part is the database ). Unfortunately we aren´t very familiar with Rails we are all more PHP guys.
Do you have any ideas how to get the server costs down? Is there for example a cache plugin or any easy solution for this problem?
Sound´s interesting, do we in this case still have full controll over the code? So are we still able to implement ads and other things? Is it possible to migrate our existig database and code in your system?
I host a similar sized instance on a dedicated Hetzner server for about EUR 70/month. They just provide the hardware though, the rest is up to you. And for what it’s worth I was a PHP/WordPress only guy before this. It’s a bit of a learning curve but support here is great and you’ll pick it up fast.