Moving to Another VPS Provider

First of all I should express my gratitude for such a lovely platform. I enjoyed using Discourse every moment and I wish moving to another platform is not the only option.

We have a small brewing community in Turkey, at craftbeertr.com and we have been using discourse happily for the last 3-4 years. Although we have ~500 users, the number of active users is much smaller, but lots of people follow and learn from the forum without starting a membership.

We try to stay independent and therefore have to share the expenses among a very small group of people and as our money had lost a great deal of its value to foreign currencies, it become a little expensive for us to maintain our expenses. Hence, I thought moving to another platform might be a solution with keeping the identities. As a newbie forum admin I do not have the slightest idea whether this would be possible or not. I Googled but couldnā€™t find something useful.

Maybe this is not the right place to ask this but I couldnā€™t come up with a better idea.

Any recommendations to solve this dilemma? We are using Ocean serversā€¦ Any cheaper options possible? Will it be possible to decrease the cost if we try to keep using Discourse? Which platform will you suggest?

Apologies in advance if this is not the topic you want to be in this forum. Thank you very much for your help.

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What is your budget for hosting and whatā€™s your rough spend on Digital Ocean?

Itā€™s possible that you can get by with smaller servers that what youā€™re using.

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what about self hosting from your house? whatā€™s your internet like?

i self host a bunch of stuff from a ā€˜hyper-convergedā€™ machine in my basement.

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This might be your low cost solution - running it at your home with a raspi and your own internet -

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Hetzner or Contabo?:

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Hi,

I visited your forum, nice job. :clap:

You can try AWS EC2 with Reserved Instances + upront payment.

For emails try AWS SES.

And also if you add Adsense ads on your forum you can get some income for expenses.

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Thank you very much for all your feedback @supermathie, @shyguy, @anderer, @merefield and @ufukayyildiz.

Wow, it seems thereā€™s a lot I need to learn.

Believe or not, I thought when we use Discourse we have to host at Ocean. We are using Oceanā€™s cheapest option, as far as I know, and itā€™s something like $14. I am aware that this is not a big amount for you guys but itā€™s not cheap for us people living in Turkey.

Iā€™ll dig into your comments at the first inconvenience and start investigating the options you stated.

@ufukayyildiz, thank you very much for your nice words mate. Have you registered? :slight_smile:

Thank you very much for each one of you.

Best wishes from Ankara.

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No! We pick that as our example as itā€™s an accessible option for a lot of people and we know the servers are of the right type.

Any VM provider that provides a full virtual server (i.e. not a jailed or containered environment) should work.

Do you have any suggestions for the install guide to make this clearer?

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we have one discourse running at ā€œhomeā€ on server/raspi with a very fast internet and one running at strato - where it is 1 euro per month - when we had 100 users at the very same time on our site then it was noticeably slower - but in all other cases the 1 euro solution worked perfectly. and for email you might use gmail (see this forum) or maybe your current plan where you get your domain from provides smtp already for you.

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Thank you very much for all these nice suggestions.
We have funds for the next couple of months and I will spend the beginning of my retirement days reading about how to organize these changes.

I am glad that I had asked.

I am sorry but couldnā€™t understand what you mean. If you are asking whether I have an easy guide for a new installation, I thought I will find the guidance in this forum. :slight_smile:

My connection is fine.
I will consider the option but already found very cheap servers. Thank you.

Just curious, @BogacErkan ā€“ after all of this discussion, what very cheap servers did you find?

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Thankfully, Iā€™ve been guided to two suppliers.

The first one is in German hosting company and it costs ā‚¬1/month. But as far as I can see, web site is in German.

The second one is a Turkish web host and the price is ~ā‚¬14/year.

As it will be easier to get help in native language, I plan to go with the second option. Considering we are paying $14/month to Ocean, this will be a much much cheaper alternative for us.

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@BogacErkan what are the names/websites of the 2 companies you found?

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Our existing install documentation says:

Create your new cloud server, for example on DigitalOcean:

You mentioned that

so Iā€™m asking if you followed our usuall install documentation and if that was what left you with the impression you had to use DO. If so, Iā€™d like to try and correct it.

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One is right in this topic @denvergeeksā€¦

The other option is www.poyrazhosting.com

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Another friend was the admin back then and he had installed the forum. As far as I know he didnā€™t follow the installation guide @supermathie.

It seems what I have in mind was just an impression and as I will install the new version, I will follow the guide you mentioned. I will inform you if I come across with any ambiguities but ı am sure I wonā€™t see anything. Thank you very much for your guidance.

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Glad we could help you keep your community, and please feel free to check in if you have any questions.

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FYI I hope you donā€™t mind but I changed the title. It was a little misleading as suggested you were leaving Discourse.

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