Hosting Plan Suggestion for 500 Concurrent Online Users

[Akshay_Gadekar]

I’m Completely new to Discourse. You can say, I’m a virgin at Discourse.

I’m Expecting User interactions
Max 500 Online Concurrent Users Reading Posts
Max 50 Posts/Replay Per Minute
Every Topic Contains 2Images(2MB) Average

Suggest Hosting Plans? Suitable Hardware Requirements(RAM/Processor/SSD)?

[itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma)]

While this may be wildly inaccurate depending upon the user behavior but in my understanding, Going a conservative route of 4 CPU Cores and at least 8 GB of RAM coupled with SSD storage (whatever you need depending upon your content requirement + 25%) should give you enough headroom.
Try to use recent version of CPU to benefit from their performance.

[Akshay_Gadekar]

Thanks @itsbhanusharma
have you hosted any forum?
if yes
then please share your current user interactions & Hosting Plan with Hardware. & also Forum Link

[itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma)]

I don’t have any hosted forum myself but I do have many client forums as case studies:

1. ~4000 Users (Active Simultaneous 700+) Forum runs on above given specification
2. ~2500 Users (Active Simultaneous 250+) Forum Runs on 2 Core 4 GB
3. ~500 Users (Active Simultaneous ~50-60) Forum Runs on 1 Core, 2 GB RAM

[Akshay_Gadekar]

where you hosted this suggest me.
I am starting a forum for social work in India. Now I want to test this with my City Aurangabad.

If I successfully tested this concept then I Want to promote it to all Over India.
I want to start Different Discourse for every City with Subdomain Example: Aurangabad.Example.com, Delhi.Example.com - its just example I have not selected domain name yet.

[itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma)]

I’d suggest hosting with Digitalocean (They have a DC location in Bengaluru so good latency across India)

About your plan, I’d suggest go with a rather powerful server and set up discourse multisite to make your life easier.
And I can get involved in it for the development phase since this is a project based in India.

[Akshay_Gadekar]

@itsbhanusharma

set up discourse multisite

What it means?

I want to set up different discourse for every city because it will need local moderators.
because I want to show city-wise forum to user.

@itsbhanusharma

I can get involved in it for the development phase since this is a project based in India.

Yes

[itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma)]

@Akshay_Gadekar

What it means?

Multisite configuration with Docker

While multisite is supported in the Discourse application, this is an advanced sysadmin setup. If you don’t know what you’re doing, do not set up multisite. The Discourse team is unable to provide multisite configuration support. If you wish to host multiple domains on a singled Docker setup, you’ll need a multisite configuration. Here are the basic building blocks for one. Understand hooks Multisite is a fairly advanced topic. Before attempting a multisite build, spend some time…

[Akshay_Gadekar]

I am working on this concept development from 6 Month. but i have wasted so much time to thinking it on android. Now i decided website based system will work well because user are lazy to install new apps. Website is easy to use specially Discourse.
I am using similar Discourse forum from 2-3 years.

[Akshay_Gadekar]

@itsbhanusharma

• ~4000 Users (Active Simultaneous 700+) Forum runs on above given specification
• ~2500 Users (Active Simultaneous 250+) Forum Runs on 2 Core 4 GB
• ~500 Users (Active Simultaneous ~50-60) Forum Runs on 1 Core, 2 GB RAM

please give me links of these 3 forums. to check there traffic interactions

[itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma)]

Can’t disclose without client consent. Against business policies.

[SouperC (NotSoSuper)]

How sure are you will see this kind of activity from day 1? Where are you getting the figures from? Are you migrating an existing forum?

Most hosts offer very scalable solutions. Start with the best you can budget for with a host that has scalability both ways. One thing is that discourse values fast CPU over a group of slower ones.

With images it might be best to consider a “cloud” storage/delivery service like Amazon S3 which is supported by Discourse. This will help with hosting costs, efficiency and visitor experience by offloading image duties to Amazon’s infrastructure.

Multisite could be challenging from a technical and community perspective. Personally I would engage a developer/dev ops person of you choose to go that route. Even if you are capable of the dev ops yourself, it’s probably not the best use of your time.

Otherwise you could setup categories for cities as you roll them out and set the subdomain to redirect to the URL of that category.

[Stephen]

You don’t deploy anticipating this load on day one.

Start small and scale up, DigitalOcean will let you do this.

[Akshay_Gadekar]

@SouperC

How sure are you will see this kind of activity from day 1? Where are you getting the figures from? Are you migrating an existing forum?

This is just Predictions because i want to calculate expenses. Because this forum for social work.
No i’m not migrating

@SouperC

setup categories for cities

I think it will not work for me. because I have to set categories to every city.

[Remah (Just another happy Discourse user)]

@Akshay_Gadekar

I want to set up different discourse for every city because it will need local moderators.

A separate Discourse instance for each city is likely to become an administration nightmare which is why I’d have look at using a category for each city.

If you use categories then you can have specific “moderators” for each category:

Category Group Review/Moderation

There have been many changes to this feature since first released. Check out Category Moderator Improvements for the latest details. In the latest builds of Discourse I’ve recently merged a feature that some forums have been asking for some time now, the ability for regular non-staff users of a group to moderate and review content in specific categories. How to Use Enable the enable category group moderation site setting. It’s default to off. The site setting was called enable cat…

This sort of per city/state structure for a country has been discussed before so you should find some useful info:

How to structure my forum?

Hi All, Below is how I am planning to implement my forum. Could someone please guide me how to structure it? There are X no of states in my country. Each state has a seperate group and each group sub-divided into sub groups to represent cities. During registration user will enter his state and city. As per this he will be added to his respective groups and subgroups(state and city). Every group and subgroup has it’s own set of categories. Only users from the respective groups can work on thos…

Cross discourse category hosting?

Does discourse have the capability to host categories from other instances? Use case is a number of regional discourse instances for my cycling group with a central one that hosts all the regional content in their own categories. Or ability to tag topics for the central site.

[Drew-ART (Drew)]

Is there an upper limit to concurrently connected users on Discourse, or is it all down to how powerful your servers are?

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

It depends only on your resources. I have a couple of very busy sites on a single vm using cdn for Discourse and S3. It’s also possible (but not supported) to run multiple servers with autoscaling).