# Setting up SSL with my domain name and Discourse instance

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/setting-up-ssl-with-my-domain-name-and-discourse-instance/51626>\
**Category:** Product Support\
**Created:** [October 17, 2016, 5:26am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/setting-up-ssl-with-my-domain-name-and-discourse-instance/51626 "2016-10-17T05:26:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

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**Author:** ![tshenry](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/tshenry/32/119495_2.png) [@tshenry](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tshenry)\
**Post date:** [October 20, 2016, 12:10am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/setting-up-ssl-with-my-domain-name-and-discourse-instance/51626/7 "2016-10-20T00:10:39Z")

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My concern is with scaling. I’m glad these cloud servers have that ability, but I suspect it can get out of hand. It would be way less than ideal, but I can probably manage to spend the $240 a year it would take to run a solid instance of Discourse on Digital Ocean. But there are all kinds of variables I just don’t know about.

I want to run a small private photography forum with about 8 members. Sharing and maintaining high quality photos for the life of the forum will end up taking a toll on the base storage restrictions of these cloud servers, even within the first year. In contrast, I can buy a few 1-2TB physical hard drives for a home web server and it would be a one-time cost that should last for a very long time.

The monthly payments and the additional costs when you reach your limits with the cloud hosting makes me nervous. I don’t have an income that allows for a ton of flexibility right now and I’ve made it a pretty solid decision that I don’t want to ask my members for money toward hosting.

If I break it down to a worst-case scenario of storage:

- Each photo posted is **12MB**
- A member posts **80** photos in a photo-oriented topic
- There are **80** photo topics **a year**
- That would make for **~76GB** of storage adding up **a year**.

I don’t know exactly if/how you can manipulate where attachments are stored with Discourse, but if the files need to be on the same “drive” as the Discourse instance, I would have to change to the $80 a month plan at Digital Ocean within the first year. Maybe there are ways of scaling the SSD storage that I’m not fully grasping, and if there are, I would appreciate any pointers on how that works.

The bottom line in my logic is that it seems like a much more stable and cost-effective method to do all of this with my own hardware, but maybe I am incredibly naive and would be in for a world of hurt with this method.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/setting-up-ssl-with-my-domain-name-and-discourse-instance/51626)._