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.
@merefield Yes it is, but it’s possible. It’s what I had on the $6/month DigitalOcean droplet for years. I occasionally had to remove old logs and images in order to upgrade which was inconvenient.
The $25/year Linveo plan that I’m on has 50GB NVMe disk, which is the same as the $12/month droplet.
Thanks for sharing this! I set up a multisite installation for staging instances on their 4GB/100GB vps (for $50/yr with the code). Runs nice so far and I really like their control dashboard, straightforward and simple.
@nolo Cool! Yeah, coming from AWS and Digital Ocean I like the simple dashboard, since I don’t need the fancy stuff, it’s nice being able to find what I do need
I’m curious: what’s the advantage of opening port 587, over switching to port 2525 (which is what I ended up doing after running discourse doctor):
My email hosting service requires connections to their default smtp server to be made through ports 465 or 587. I later found that they offer a proxy server to connect to using alternative ports, but maybe that could affect deliverability? In any case, then I had already asked to open the port.
Has anyone heard of Kamatera for hosting Discourse?
I’m looking for the best hosting options available for Discourse right now. Specifically, we’re planning to integrate Discourse’s API into our mobile app (which is built using React Native) to create a community feature.
Any recommendations or experiences with this setup?
Honestly, I’m a complete newbie when it comes to servers. I know only basic Bash commands, but I managed to deploy my Discourse instance to GCP. It wasn’t too difficult, and I just tagged the given firewall tags (if that even did anything), didn’t change port configuration (IIRC), and it works.
Your post is a bit older, but maybe you’re still using Hetzner for your server, so I was wondering: did you actually proceed with the move? And if so, what are your experiences with the CAX servers?
(I’m re-starting efforts to move a medium-sized - typically 100-200 concurrent users, 2-3M page requests/month - community to Discourse; it’s relatively certain that we’ll go with Hetzner, and my initial thought was to use either a CPX31 or CCX23 machine, I’m starting to wonder if CAX31 is also an option).
(I’m a different case, but for me Hetzner’s CAX11, their cheapest server which is also ARM, is working well. I have two forums, each on a CAX11, one of which I migrated from DigitalOcean, and I’m happy with the outcome: more storage, more RAM, lower cost, if I remember correctly. And no problem for me with performance, although it is a low-traffic forum (max 7000 pageviews daily)
I’m not sure why there are discrepancies in rebuild time for the same intel servers.
ARM and AMD CPUs are way faster to rebuild, and it seems the forum’s pages are also faster to load.
Maybe I’ll move my smallest forums to ARM servers in the future and see how performances differ.
The only thing that annoys me is:
But from what I have seen, I’d recommend Hetzner’s ARM servers, at least over Intel ones, they seem faster overall.
Based on your experiences (and also what @Ed_S shared), it seems that even the CAX21 might already work. And for a smaller project that I’m currently spinning up in parallel, the CAX11 should do (didn’t expect it to outperform the CX22 so clearly).
I’m not sure whether I will use mail-receiver, but I do agree that it seems like an omission, given that the rest of the stack and also most other things one might need for a Discourse install (Traefik, Crowdsec, etc.) seem to be compatible with ARM64.
For some reason, I couldn’t rebuild on my Intel CX22 (4 GB RAM) this afternoon, which hosts a small forum.
I had to add swap (2 GB) to successfully rebuild, which is surprising as Discourse officially requires way less, and ./discourse-setup only creates swap if the instance has less than 2 GB RAM.
Have requirements increased since Discourse Setup was created? In which case it could be a good idea to tweak this part of Discourse Setup. cc @pfaffman since you created this script, unless I’m mistaken.
But I recon it depends of amount and type of plugins etc.