I have a spare PC which I can use as a server, host, or whatever discourse needs. It is connected to my storage server, so plenty of storage (130TB + 8tb of ssd’s in the pc itself) and has good specs, 64gb of ram, intel i9-12900k and 2x Nvidia Titan.
I just want to make a forum that I can host online through that PC, so no one needs to connect to my wifi to run it, and can just go and run it off their mobile network. Basically I previously used a whatsapp group, but it’s just getting uncategorised, so I have decided to setup a forum. I don’t want to spend money, cause why would I. It should be easy to follow since I am a beginner, and yeah some extra guides on stuff like how do I forward the ports and stuff from local to the internet to make it work online.
I have referred to other topics, but I can’t really understand.
Thanks for the help.
The free tier has been available since launch, if I recall correctly. Sure - it loses money, but it gains a lot of customers. If the tier has been around for so long, they must be benefiting from it one way or another.
There are scores of SMTP providers you can find online, and almost all of them have a free-tier which doesn’t require a credit card.
To expose the service to the internet, you can use something like Cloudflare tunnels (Free), without opening up a port on your router.
But this is a huge security risk, as it allows an adversary to exploit vulnerabilities on discourse or anything else you expose using tunnels to establish a foothold on the server, and completely compromise your home network. If you end up doing this, at the very least you might want to place your server in the DMZ network of your router, and not open any ports to it. Do any admin work directly on the server.
You’ll need email as discussed. If you try hard you can use mailgun pay as you go, but they make it hard to figure out how to get in that plan. It’s $1/1000 emails.
Yes, however, Mailgun requires a credit card for registration - at least that was the case when I registered, Mailjet does not. One of the original enquiries was “Can you sign up without a credit card?”.
Changed recently - Accounts without a credit card are limited to sending 100 messages a day!
Yeh, I could go with that. We usually only have 60-70 messages a day. But I think the pay as you go is a better option, I mean in an emergency I couldn’t go and get limit of 100 msgs. I am ready to pay 1$/1000 emails subscription, it’s cheap and I can divide that between my freinds too. So like less than 10 cents per 1000 emails for me. We all live in the same apartment, if we all can get a extra routers as repeaters and buy one fast 1gbps router with a fast plan together, it could possibly enable us to talk when we are home, that is on the residential network. I have to wait to think to go on cloud with the 100$ plan as discourse offers, because that is per month, abd considering I would be using the forum for more than 10 years, it will cost me 12000$ atleast. Instead I want a one time pay, like investing 2000$ on all the hardware right now, and paying like 30 bucks a month for the fast wifi (internet is dirt cheap here) then it would only take 3600+2000 that is 5600$, half the price. And considering my friends are too paying, less than 150$.
Didn’t think of that . I will disable notifications then.
Anyways, everyone pays there own share. It would be around 3-4000 notifications then. Probably 4 bucks a day, 120 bucks per month. Yeh, I believe the 100$ plan of discourse is viable.
How ironic, came here to spend no dime, instead ended up to pay 10 grands
. I will disable notifications then.