I think it’s worth considering the ease of use with DO. For many, there is a value to that and the specs dont tell the whole story. Linode etc are on very different ease of use level. Considering it’s ease of use and ability to run discourse on it in that price bracket, it’s pretty good.
Horses for courses.
Could you elaborate? I haven’t used Linode but my impression from several other providers is that they don’t differ much in terms of UX. Maybe excluding Aruba Cloud, whose backed is a complete mess. But even with them, you will be SSHing into your VPS 99 percent of the time and there is no difference whatsoever, obviously.
For people who know about ssh, you’re right. I think that Linode by default includes a small swap partition that you have to know how to remove in order to allow Discourse-setup to be able to create a big enough swap. Things line that are No big deal for you, but those several extra clicks can take hours of hair pulling for lots of people.
Oh, I see. Well, that would probably have given me headaches too. My first discourse installation was certainly not 30 minutes (more like 30 hours) but that was also due to the fact that I didn’t take the easy route. I went straight for setting it up together with a WordPress install behind a reverse proxy. I learned a lot, but it was only with my second instance that I realized just how easy the setup is when you just use the setup script. I was like whaaa? And it’s even https?? Without me doing anything? With my third instance I might have made it within the 30 minutes, if only I had gone with mailgun.