I already have a server for one of my communities, using Hetzner Cloud.
Since I’m just starting out, there’s not enough traffic yet and even when it starts growing, the initial traffic will not be enough that justifies 2 servers.
I wanted to spend some time building the community without having to spend extra money, if I don’t have to, especially because I don’t even know when it really justifies 2 servers. Even at a low price of $5 a month, if it takes me 10 months to get to a point where the traffic justifies a separate server, that’s $50 that I could save and use for something else.
Can I use a single server for 2 Discourse installations?
I’m thinking that maybe there’s some conflict because of the IP, but since I’m not an expert, I don’t know the options?
It’s mentioned in the excerpt, but worth emphasizing: be aware that enabling multisite puts your installation in unsupported-install, which means developers and the community may be less willing to help with issues.
Great! Thank you for sharing the link. It seems a bit complex, but I’m sure that following the instructions and asking some questions to ChatGPT and Claude along the way to clarify some stuff, along with asking questions here on the forum, will allow me to achieve this.
Since this is just an experiment while I still have no users, even if something goes wrong, it’s not a big deal, as long as I have a full back up, which I always do.
Questions:
The instructions assume that I’m installing 2 or more at the same time, or can I follow the instructions to add an extra Discourse instance “next” to the current community?
If in the future I then want to move to separate servers, will it be possible and “easy” to migrate without major/complex steps?
Migration might be trickier, I think you’d probably need to take a backup of both sites and then repeat the same steps. I’m not sure if rsync will work here.
UPDATE: @alltiagocom By how the docs is phrased, I think you can add more than 2 sites:
Oh ok. I didn’t know that…
Thanks for letting me know.
This community really is a good source of help, and if saving $ puts me in a category where I may “break” that connection in some areas, I should consider if that’s the route or not…?
I’m really wondering if that’s a good route, with all the extra “quirks” and then not being able to maybe get help in certain areas, because then my configuration will be very specific?
I need to think this through. At this point I do have at least 4 communities that could be created and that would be $20 a month. So I either take a chance with just one server, or I wait until it makes sense to really have all communities up and running and pay for separate servers.
Discourse multisite is very well tested, unless you have some customisations in place, there are seasoned people here who will be able to help with it. That being said, with a bit of perseverance you can set up two standalone discourse installs on same server too if need be.
The only customization is really just the stuff we all talk about here. Components, plugins, etc. Nothing fancy.
My goal was to really just being able to have separate communities asap, instead of waiting months to set them up separately. And of course, if I would pay $5 a month for 4 small communities instead of $20, that would be even better. Then gradually move one or more of those to their own servers.
$5/mo won’t really cut it, if you want to host either multisite or standalone multiple sites, You need a beefy machine with enough resource allocation, multisite actually wins here because we can add and remove new sites with minimal downtime, and resource utilisation is relatively lower. however I would recommend against trying to make a $5 node as your multisite host.
$5 would be the initial setup, so I could install, customize it, maybe bring a few users to get the ball rolling.
For example, I could always upgrade the machine, but even going from $5 to $12 ( CAX31Ampere ®, 8 VCPU, 16 GB RAM, 160 GB NVMe SSD, 20 TB Traffic incl), that’s cheaper than $20 for 4 individual servers. Does that make sense?
Would that $12 machine be considered a “beefy machine”, like you said?
I was on their CX11 (2Core 4GB) plan for a while and hosted 4 very low traffic sites in a multisite cluster without much fuss. But those sites were mostly a playground for a group of friends, not necessarily for real production use. Only one of the site had ~30 daily active users, rest of them were essentially ghost town, only used for testing.
Not quite true, maybe my phrasing was not correct but by Standalone multiple sites, I meant multiple (app.yml) containers on the same server, not on different servers.
Changes it as “that’s a good thing” or “that’s not a good thing”?
It seems like it’s a good thing?
Based on what you wrote, it seems like 4 small communities, even on a “cheap” machine, was ok enough? So, I can always start with that and then just upgrade the machine when things seem to go wrong?
So the question now is: if upgrading the machine does indeed help, would it even make sense at all to really migrate to individual servers? Of maybe their CAX41 would be enough to handle that?
Also, without knowing much about this, would it create conflicts when it comes to Brevo email notifications the fact that it’s only one IP, or that doesn’t make a difference? If the set up goes as planned, everything will be working as if it’s separate servers per community, or is there a scenario where I could have issues?
So, you mean that there’s an option where there’s a single app.yaml file (multisite) and an option where there’s an app.yaml file per discourse installation? Can you clarify the pros and cons of this? And why would you pick one over the other? Again, I’m not an expert, so bear with me here if I’m asking questions that are too obvious…
