Help with migrating forum to discourse (self hosting)

Installation Hosting
1

Hello everyone,

I am looking to convince my existing community to migrate towards dicourse.

We are not that proficient in IT and looking for help here. Our current forum is hosted in an office rented on behalf of the community, it was set up in mid 2006 (with god knows what). As you might have guessed the forum lacks lustre and is losing traction since it is not cross compatible with smartphones.

Additional Information:

  1. The community is mostly comprised of engineers, professors and technicians discussing engineering problems, sharing high-res pictures, excel sheets, pdf’s etc. Posting job adverts.
  2. Region India [AWS EC2/lightsail: Asia-Pacific (Hyderabad)]
  3. ~30000 strong user base. We are expecting to add another 40000 or more users.
  4. Require linkedin / google authentication.
  5. If possible: badges for donating members (to offset the cost of running the server) (Also looking suggestions on how to set up web payment for donations)

I’m seeking your help in working out the cost for complete setup.

I’m overwhelmed by AWS Pricing Calculator and really don’t know what plans to choose. (It would be better if the annual costs are fixed rather that variable provides a better base for financially planning).

We are looking to do this as cheaply as possible.

Any and all suggestions are welcome.

Thank you in advance

3

What software is running now? The first step, I assume, is migrating the data.

How many posts are there? How big is the current database?

How many pageviews do you have and expect? The number of users matters little, the number of simultaneous users matters much more.

Knowing nothing about your traffic, I would guess that a 2 to 4gb EC2 would suffice. For a frame of reference, on digital ocean that’s US$14-28/month.

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