Over the last few years, I’ve held hundreds of conversations with folks looking to customize Discourse. But everyone has one unifying decision involved no matter the situation: how should we host Discourse?
The easiest (and most hands-off) is to host through CDCK themselves. And I’ve certainly recommended their managed hosting numerous times. And frankly, what better way to host your site than through the team that makes the software itself?
But there are also times when doing a managed hosting process isn’t feasible or your company needs to own the server your data lives on. Those situations require you to self-host your Discourse.
Here’s where it gets tricky. If your environment dictates you need to self-host (or you just want to), but you don’t have the expertise to do so, what do you do? And what are your options if you need to self-host but also need hands-on support occasionally?
Basically, there’s a gap there. And that’s why we’ve built ProCourse Butler.
Under Butler, the ProCourse team handles everything except the community management itself. So all theme installations, plugin installations, regular Discourse updates, server upgrades, and general Q&A go through the ProCourse team of Discourse experts.
At the same time, having talked through this service with existing customers, we realized there’s also a need for proactive monitoring of communities to make sure someone is aware of problems immediately as opposed to waiting for an email.
Thus, Butler Pro. With the Pro version, everything is the same except you also get offsite backups, offsite image uploads, and site monitoring that sends ProCourse alerts if there are any problems that arise.
Both Butler and Butler Pro come with a free conversion to a two-container setup if you already have Discourse up and running.
And if you set up annual billing, you’ll get a free month as well as a free Discourse installation if you don’t already have an instance of Discourse.
If this is something that fits your hosting structure and situation, feel free to reach out: hello@procourse.co. I’ll personally follow-up and we can talk through all the details.