Recommend inexpensive managed hosting?

hosting
#1

I found Communiteq managed hosting offering, tried to contact them via their contact form but kept getting error “There was an error trying to send your message. Please try again later.”

Doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence if their contact-form is not even functional. Can anyone recommend relatively inexpensive managed discourse hosting?

My needs are as such:

I want to use Ghost for my blog and power the comments with a managed discourse hosting.

  1. For my Ghost blog, will each post automatically also become a “thread” (or “topic”) on hosted discourse?
    I want my users to be able to post comments below the blog post. But also be able to directly go to forums (forums.mydomain.com) and participate in the thread there.

  2. I want my users to be able to upload images. Since images take-up a lot of space, I am wondering if images are uploaded to Discourse server or some other image-hosting server that I’ve to separately pay for? I have heard of people using S3 but I don’t know if thats for archives or live-forums. My forum audience/demographic is as such that I expect every single post to contain images, usually, memes, movie-screenshots. Screenshots are likely going to be several MBs each.

  3. I don’t expect a big community, maybe 50-100 users active in a month and only a few active concurrently. But if one of my blog post goes viral (Reddit or something) and a lot of people to come my blog-post (hosted separately from discourse), the Discourse-commenting embedded below the post, will still hit Discourse servers and tax the system? Say, 10,000 users come in from Reddit. Even if they are not actively commenting and just reading the blog, the comments below would have to load everytime.So, what kind concurrent load / server do I need to be able to handle such large traffic spike? I hope I write many blog posts that go viral!

  4. Let’s say I want to have 2 types of users. Free & Paid. Free can not upload images, but they can embed links from imgur etc. Paid are allowed to upload images directly on the forums. Is this possible to do?

#2

The team at Unison Hosting can help with the hosting. Email me at yanokwa@unisonhosting.com so we can put together a plan of attack!

2 Likes
#3

I have a number of clients who are quite happy with the services of Communiteq; I expect that their contact form error is spurious and not an indicator of their hosting services.

That said, I offer a variety of hosting solutions and can probably help. Please email jay@literatecomputing.com.

5 Likes
#4

Luckily our website is not made by the same people as our infrastructure. This seems to be an overenthusiastic Recaptcha spam protection. I am going to make sure that it is fixed right away. (EDIT it’s fixed and it was caused by a Wordpress plugin that was not tested well enough).

Please take my word that this is NOT a good reflection of our technical skills (or lack thereof). My apologies for the confusion and inconvenience.

Short answers to your questions:

  1. Yes, Ghost can be configured as such.
  2. Images are uploaded to Discourse. You can “bring your own” S3 if you want. I would not worry too much about the sizes though. You need a lot of images to fill up space.
  3. From the top of my head, those comments are being cached for non-logged-in users.
  4. I’m afraid that would require a custom plugin, but that is certainly possible.
6 Likes
#5

Thanks! It seems like Unison plans are quite expensive for my needs right now.

Thanks. I see they posted on this thread.

I understand. I see your private message as well, I’ll respond.

3 Likes
#6

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