Help in new server install - small forum group

Good evening,

I have a small group of friends who continue to use proboards, but I have looked for better options for mobile forum use. Discourse has been really impressive with the photo upload from photo library on iphone and drag/drop from windows.

I am looking for help in setting up the forums by purchasing the one time purchase and hosting on AWS. I have run servers before but with admin portals or lists of commands to run, so I’m competent, but need initial hand holding on the process.

Thanks for the assistance.


Adam

We recommend the $99 one time fee install service as covered in our official install guide: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md

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Thanks I was a little intimidated by this at first and thought I saw reference to come here to ask for help on the pay site.

That said, after reading through a few times though I feel confident about doing it myself, and I’ve seen clear examples across the support community giving very fast responses, so thank you.

One last question I have though is a very n00b one. When setting up a domain for the forums, do I set up through a domain site like godaddy first with a url, then do everything through the hosted server at digitalocean, or do I have a non-custom url from digitalocean first, then route it to a customer url later?

I can restate that since I’m guessing there’s a high probability that doesn’t make sense what I’m asking.

Thanks

Looks like I found a partial answer to my question: that I would have an IP address to access the forums, but still not sure how to set this up with a custom DNS.

Start Discourse

Once bootstrapping is complete, your Discourse should be accessible in your web browser via the domain name discourse.example.com you entered earlier, provided you configured DNS. If not, you can visit the server IP directly, e.g. http://192.168.1.1.

I’m good now sorry for finding out the answer after asking the question. Maybe someone else will find this useful later through searching.

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You definitely want to buy a domain name first, it will be much easier down the road.

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  1. buy a domain name and configure it with an external DNS (Ej: Cloudns.net)
  2. buy your VPS instance
  3. point your DNS to the IP of your VPS instance.

If you have not some linux skills, I suggest to buy the setup services offered by the community.