Any suggestions for a good vps provider to host discourse? Any feedback for Liniode vs Digital ocean?
Digital Ocean’s $20 plan seems to be good. It has 2GB RAM and 2 cores. Not sure if 2GB RAM is sufficient though? Please advice.
Please ignore the RAM requirement question. Install guide is pretty clear on RAM needs for the application.
Please do post yoru suggestions on hosting provider. Thanks.
Digital Ocean is great. Linode was mixed until they upgraded their hardware recently, have heard good buzz about their new configs.
Either might be a good choice at this point.
4 Likes
Why not try them? Both have free trials for either a week or a month; and you can always move the data between them.
I am not registered on either of the sites, but pricing link talks about minimum 5$ instance on digitalocean and i think for Discourse setup one has to start with 10$ instance per month. Is me missing something here?
I prefer DigitalOcean. Have 3 servers here (2x512 and 1x1024 versions in Amsterdam) - great experience. But I am not running Discourse - want to deploy it today and test it.
I think, you can try 1024MB version with puma server.
Also, here you can find a review of a 512MB installation: http://meta.discourse.org/t/512mb-of-ram-is-enough-to-run-discourse/6844
2 Likes
I host on amazon medium aws, no complaints.
Digital ocean offers hourly pricing, and often has a promo code for $5 of credit. That’s enough for 2-3 days of hosting with 2GB of ram to see if it is worth buying or not.
Linode offers one week free at any level. Many of the larger VPS companies offer some time to see if their packages are worth paying for.
2 Likes
I went ahead with DigitalOcean. Excellent product and service. Highly recommend it.
Either is fine, I have my Discourse being developed and testing on Digital Ocean 1G Ram. It runs just fast and fine 
This might be a silly question, but do standard Linode configs give enough grunt to run Discourse well?
The minimum specs say a fair bit of swap, and on Linode they provide up to 512MB swap sizes. Sure, I could resize it to 2GB or so, but there are all sorts of dire warnings on linode forums about doing that.
Given that it’s not SSD, is upping the swap to the recommended specs on Linode: a) possible, or b) a good idea?
Swap is generally not a good idea if you can avoid it. better off with a host that uses KVMs balloning driver and allow you to burst over your alloted ram using real ram. Only 1 host i know of right now that has actually implemented that KVM feature successfully and that is Ioflare.com who also is a SSD based Cloud provider much like DO. Though i am not sure if they are excepting orders yet haven’t checked back there in awhile.
Linode and Discourse are quite expensive when you compare prices with some hosting providers offering dedicated servers with +8GB RAM.
Dedicated servers have their points for sure but hosting in the cloud gives you much more peace of mind. At some point on a dedi you will have hardware go and if you are unlucky like me it will happen multiple times per year which results in downtime. In the cloud you should really not have to worry about downtime at all.
Well, until everyone is as universially enlightened as this one provider you cited that I have never heard of, configuring swap remains a good idea.
Noted. Just because you haven’t heard of them doesn’t mean they are no good. I didn’t hear about Discourse until a month or so ago. ioflare has been in beta for the last 6 months or so and have not marketed at all yet so yeah they are unheard of and maybe not even open yet.
I saw a post about their use of the KVM ballooning feature on webhosting talk and seems they are the only ones to get it going stable in production…just thought I would mention that as it is kinda cool.
Indeed it is cool! But it strikes me as irresponsible to say
Saying “swap is not a good idea”… is not a good idea. 
1 Like
Hehe well maybe I have had things badly configured in the past but I have found that once a machine has to start swapping performance gets throttled. I just prefer to throw more actual ram into the mix, that’s just me though 
Swapping does allow a system to perform better under many circumstances. A lot of applications use quite a bit of memory that is only needed during application initialization. If the OS is able to swap these pages out to disk, the memory that is thus freed can be reused for a lot more useful stuff like disk caching.
That doesn’t mean that you should rely on swap space as a replacement of physical memory, that’s pushing things too far indeed.
I don’t subscribe to that idea. Bare metal servers works well, and if you do your job, you have a good backup/replication strategy so much reliable than any VPS out there.