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
AI-generated summary
The necessity of DigitalOcean for setting up a Discourse forum is discussed. dax and pfaffman agree that DigitalOcean is not mandatory, and other servers supporting Docker can be used. pfaffman shares a list of easy-to-use providers and recommends Mailgun for email services, while also mentioning their own installation services. Mihir shares their experience with alternative providers, including Linode, SparkPost, Vultr, AWS EC2, and Google Cloud.
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
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.
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.
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.