Hi discourse team & community ,
I am a newbie with discourse , after some days researching about discourse , I plan to use this with my company’ s business.
Here are the list of my concerns & question about discourse :
1, What are the differences between self-host and discourse business host ? ( any limitation on features ? )
2, Can I upgrade from my self -host to discourse business host ? How much ? ( eg : transfer my current database )
Thanks ,
Sorry, had to move it to hosting
There are no operational differences in the core product. The real difference starts to occur when you look at extensibility. While you’re free to try out any plugins that you may like in the self hosted discourse version, You only get a default set of plugins preinstalled on Business Hosting.
I think discourse team offers onboarding to discourse from various platforms so migrating from self hosted discourse to Discourse’s business plan should be as simple as taking a backup and restoring on the new discourse installation. This however doesn’t account for any customization or third party plugins that you may be running.
I hope my answer was helpful.
I address this question at Discourse Self-Hosting FAQ — Literate Computing, LLC
Hello [itsbhanusharma]
“While you’re free to try out any plugins that you may like in the self hosted discourse version, You only get a default set of plugins preinstalled on Business Hosting.”
==> it means that self-host can use every office plugins that listed in all hosting plan ?
Yes we can use any plugins on self hosted
Thanks for your replies ,
I realized that :
I wonder what are the real benefits of business hosting in compare with self-host ?
And why we should choose business hosting ?
You don’t have to worry about updating the system or managing any backend systems. You can focus on building your community while discourse team focusses on making your UX seamless.
If you want to learn a lot about Discourse, and have the time and the interest, then I recommend you self-host.
If you want to focus on your core business or mission of your site and don’t want to get down into the weeds of Discourse, then a hosting company is your best best.
Personally, I fall in to the first category; studying code, config scripts, DB tables, indexes, breaking things on purpose to see how to fix them, learning more and more about Discourse. This takes a lot of time and effort. However, I like Discourse and want to master parts of the code base.
So, the bottom line is based on your business model, goals and objectives with Discourse.
Both options, self-hosting or professional-hosting are great, depending on what fits into how hands-on you want to be.
Try setting up self hosting and you will quickly find out 
It’s not too difficult but it will never be “push button and it is done” easy, far from it… email alone is a giant hairy complex bugbear due to the nature of email, nothing to do with us specifically.
You also get really good support. And new features requested by hosting customers get more attention than features requested by self hosted customers. Also, hosting pays for Discourse development, so if you want to support discourse, paying for hosting is how to do it.
But if you don’t have the money, self hosting is great for lots of people. I often see self hosted people who haven’t upgraded discourse in a year or several years and it’s just worked. And sometimes they’re paying me to get them to an up to date server before it’s down.
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