I understand that. Recently, Xooit, a French forum hosting company (that refuses to give customers’ data back if they leave) increased their price, and many users were constantly looking at their “views” number to avoid being upgraded to a very expensive plan. Looking at their complaints, It seemed indeed pretty stressful.
There are some, the only one I know is Communiteq (@RGJ) , which is listed on Discourse’s trusted partners page: Discourse partners | Discourse - Civilized Discussion.
It’s not official, available at GitHub - Arkshine/discourse-custom-progress-bar: Adds a progress bar below Discourse's header that can serve various purposes..
If used alone, the progress bar values must be changed manually from the component’s settings.
As for me, receiving donations through ko-fi.com, I used their API and Discourse’s API to automatically update the “current value” setting when someone donated.
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Hosting: I’ve been reliably using Hetzner for years, no complaints. It’s a German company, and they provide US locations only for certain VPS specs.
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Emails: I used to use Mailgun, but it was expensive, and my usage was way less than their minimum paid plan. So I’ve switched to Amazon SES which is pay-as-you-go and whose interface is not user-friendly at all.
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CDN: I needed a CDN to serve assets quickly for my international forum, I don’t use one for my French forums. I use Bunny.net.
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Domain name: I’m not the one who pays for it
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Backups: I used to host my backups on Amazon S3 as it’s natively supported by Discourse. Now, I use both server’s backups from Hetzner for +20% server price, and weekly sync Discourse’s backups on my Google Drive via rClone.
I sometimes dream of a resurrection of Synchronizer-base for any backup provider. Or better, a native support for several cloud services.