I want to host hundreds of instances of Discourse

Installation Hosting
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  1. I want to Host 100’s of Discourse. is it possible to install multiple Discourse on Single Hosting/Droplet? with URL name like - example.com/City1, example.com/City2, example.com/City3, etc (Means Separate Discourse for Every City)

  2. Because Subdomain is Expensive for this. because I want more than 100 Subdomains.

  3. How can we Copy Forum Settings to Another Forum? Because I want to apply the same settings to all discourse.

  4. Is there any way to install Plugins on multiple Instances at one time?

I want to start a Social Platform. but there are required separate instances per city.

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You want a multisite installation. It has the same plugins for all sites.

Subdomains cost nothing. A single wildcard dns record is all you need. It will be much easier to use subdomains. I’m not sure that the subfolder code is tested in multisite.

Though many settings can be set using environment variables (though they’d be the same for all sites, which is fine for some things like s3 but not others like pop mailboxes) , the best way to apply settings to all sites is probably with a plugin. You can also hide settings from the web interface.

If you have a budget I can help with all of these things.

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I have Godaddy Domain Names and there they only provide 100 Records Maximum but i need around 500.
Because there are 500 Districts/Cities

Which Plugin?

Sorry, I Don’t Have much Budget for this Because this is Social Work. Currently, I’m planning to test this for 1 city and then i have to rais fund from Donations.

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I’ve said it before that this sounds like an expensive way to do this.

If the settings are the same then why have 500 separate email sources, 500 separate moderation queues, 500 separate Discourse backups, etc.

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Because the Problems & Solutions of every district are completely Different(Categories are different / also there is language is also different). there are more points…

I have thought about it Can I Manage all this from Single Instance? but then I found that It’s not a good idea to put all-district into the single discourse.

for more practical understanding
if we put all 500 districts in a single discourse.
if the 1 district has created 1 topic/day minimum. means 500 topics/day and it’s very big amount users can’t discuss properly because topics amount is very big. There will be a storm of topics.

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Until you need to expand to multiple multisite instances, a single A wildcard A record is all you need. Other DNS providers don’t have that limit.

You would need to write it yourself.

Then you really don’t need to solve the 500 city problem right now. I would recommend just using a single site per droplet to start. Until you have > 5 cities, there’s little advantage for multisite.

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That’s Right I’m going on that way. but I know that i have to face this problem, so I’m finding solutions. I’m not completely depended on Donations. If I don’t get donations for a long time then I can run it on my own investment just I have to wait some time.

Currently, I Have a Hosted Testing site on DO 2GB RAM Droplet. there I found that the instance is not using that much amount. This means it’s Enough for 1 city.
but I thought if we host multiple discourse on single droplet with more RAM if any district don’t have traffic another district can use that resource and it will save me some money. may be. correct me if i’m thinking wrong.

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I don’t recommend going multisite with < 4GB of ram, but Multisite configuration with Docker.

From what I can tell about your skills and needs, I’d recommend going with 1GB droplets for each city until you have at least 5. In the mean time you can experiment with multisite on droplets that you spin up to test and then delete.

I recommend that you wait until you have a problem before you go about solving it.

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Thank you very much @pfaffman

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