I have been self-hosting Discourse on DigitalOcean for the past decade, first on a $5/month 1GB droplet, then on a $12/month 2GB droplet when I ran out of disk space, then back to a $6/month 1GB droplet.
I have been happy with DigitalOcean, but it’s a bit pricey for a non-commercial forum.
I recently ran across a Bradley Taunt blogpost on Hacker News mentioning a hosting deal from Linveo, a company I hadn’t heard of, offering AMD Ryzen 7950X KVM VPSs with 25gb NVMe disk for $15/year on lowendtalk.com.
I have just finished installing Discourse on the roomier AMD KVM 2GB VPS (using the 75% off code LET75AKVM2024 for $25/year), and will report back on the experience shortly.