Is DigitalOcean necessary?

[katiesmith (Katie)]

I am wanting to set up a discourse forum on my website. I am paying for discourse now, but it seems in the installation “how-to” that digitalocean is the first step for setup

[dax (Daniela)]

DigitalOcean is recommended but not mandatory. You can use any server that supports docker
https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-cheapest-solution-for-hosting/24060

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

It is almost the case that if you are asking the question, the answer is “yes”, but there are dozens of providers that will work. This list of easy-to-use providers was written with people like you in mind.

Recommended Hosting Providers for Self Hosters

This guide is intended for people who are not system administrators who just want to make Discourse work. This is a list of cloud hosting services that are believed to be reliable and easy enough for a novice to get up and running with as little fiddling as possible. You should be able to create an account, and a server on which to run your Discourse instance and still be able to pull the job off in very close to 30 minutes. I have installed Discourse on each of these, received an email from Di…

DO and Mailgun are what I use for my $99 install (but the $150 Lite Install includes https, which I recommend if you don’t want to get your hands dirty at the command line).

Again, there are other email services, but I have found Mailgun to be easy to sign up and get started with.

[Mihir]

I am using linode (for server) and sparkpost (for mail). There is also vultr, aws ec2, google cloud (for cloud server) . There are numerous providers of VPS and dedicated server.