Self-Hosting Advice

Installation Hosting
1

Hi everyone,

I love Discourse. I have for a long while. I am planning to set up my own community. I just need some advice on hosting.

So, I don’t want to the extortionate discourse pricing at £100 per month. So, I am thinking about doing down the self-hosting route. I am not seriously committed to this, so I don’t want to pay anything for it. I already have a computer that I can use but I am not sure if my internet will be able to take the hit. I imagine my community will be very small for a long time with no more than 5 members active at once. So, can someone let me know if my internet speed is good enough? I have taken this test a peek internet usage time in my house as my family are all working from home.
Ping - 6ms
Download - 68.4Mbps
Upload - 18.5Mbps

If my internet speed is not good enough, can anyone recommend a free hosting service that I can run Discourse on?

I appreciate your time and thanks in advanced.

2

Then you may be interested in Self hosting for free (with caveats!) with Oracle Cloud

3

I will find out if I can self-host first. If not, I will definitely give that a go.

4

It’s good enough to handle Discourse, you shouldn’t see any issue in bandwidth.

Just as an important note going the self-hosted non-standard installation support here will be limited. Also, I know Discourse hosting might seem expensive but extortionate is a hard word to use.

5

This looks like a home internet connection. Does it provide a static IPv4? Can it receive incoming traffic from the WAN on privileged ports like 80 and 443?

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6

Hi there @Falco,

I don’t actually know about that. However, I am going to leave it for now. If I have any further questions or concerns, I will create another topic.

Thanks for the help anywhere

7

One of the reasons that I have left it for now is that I don’t really know what I am doing. So, if anyone has created a video on how to set it up on Oricle Cloud, I would greatly appreciate it. Also, will I have to purchase a domain?

8

You should use this blog post: How to setup Discourse for free on Oracle Cloud.

It explains how to set it up fairly well.

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9

If I wanted to use a domain, would I have to purchase it separately?

10

Yes. Namecheap offers really cheap domains if you’re willing to spend just a little bit of money.

11

Ok, thanks, I will think about it.

12

I’m always a bit skeptical when things are free like this - are there any downsides to using free Oracle Cloud?

Also wondering if it would be a simple process If I set this up and then decided to move over to Digital Ocean at a later time. Could I simply transfer all the data?

13

It is really slow. Many times slower than the cheapest Digital Ocean offering.

Just follow Moving Discourse Docker install to other VPS with 1:1 sync

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14

My advice: Don’t self host.

There are decent options at the lower end of hosting. OVH is fairly inexpensive. They have a VPS for around $5/mo that will run discourse. For that you can follow the Ubuntu install guide.

Another thing to consider is the financial cost of hosting a community is minimal compared to the investment of your time.

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