So you’ve decided to try out a hosted Discourse plan. Good choice!
Before you can sign up for a plan, you need to figure out which one is right for you and your community. While you can always upgrade or downgrade your plan at a later date, this involves read-only time and thus is disruptive to your community.
Page Views: First step is to think about your expected pageviews. Do you have an existing community site with lots of users? Business or enterprise is likely for you. Are you a new startup just developing your community? Check out standard. Note: a Discourse pageview is the equavilent of ~2.5 GA pageviews.
Staff Users: All hosting plans allow for unlimited members. Our standard and business plans do limit the number of staff users allowed. Staff users are those that have moderator or admin privileges on your Discourse site. It is not the number of staff who work at your company. Ensure the plan you’re selecting allows for enough staff users. See also What is a staff user on hosted Discourse?
Authentication Options: All hosting plans support local login, Official Single-Sign-On for Discourse (sso), and common social login providers. For more advanced options you’ll need to move to a higher tier.
Plugins: Discourse supports numerous plugins, many of which are installed on our hosting plans. Check out discourse.org/plugins to see which plugins you want to use. Note that plugin installation is not customizable. Except on Enterprise, you cannot add custom plugins not already provided by your plan.
Migration: Do you want to migrate content from your existing community? You’ll need to select the business or enterprise plan. Migrations involve substantial engineering time, so we generally require a pre-payment of a year contract to handle a migration. Large migrations or migrations from certain software may require additional fees. Please contact us at team@discourse.org to discuss specifics.
Discourse Standard Hosting Terms: Can you agree to our standard hosting terms? These terms are the legal agreement between you and Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc, the company that develops Discourse. If you are unable to agree to these terms, or your legal team requires changes, you’ll need an enterprise plan. Please contact us to start the discussion.
Specific security concerns and/or non-credit card payment: Do you have specific security concerns? Are you unable to pay via credit card? If either of these are true, you’ll need an enterprise hosting agreement. Please complete the contact us form and we’ll get back to you shortly.
Thanks again for choosing one of our hosting plans!