If you want a career in IT, don’t hesitate - install and set up your own instance of Discourse on a VPS … and put that on your CV.
It’s not that hard … and every issue you come across will be an opportunity to learn something new.
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You guys are swaying me to do it, and although I am excited to learn something new and the idea makes me smile, when I look at having to manually install and renew SSLs myself, I just think it’s gonna be a pain. And SSLs are just the tip of the iceberg.
Do it.
I run 2 Discourse sites. Installed them both myself. The first one took a few days (because my SA/web/email admin knowledge was sketchy at first). The second, less than half a day?
They are an absolute pleasure to run, extremely stable (credit to the Discourse team!). It teaches you a lot and not just technical things (e.g. how much we owe to the people who built Linux, for example).
Experience like this is gold dust. Don’t even hesitate.
You have this amazing community for any issues you come across. No problem!
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Thanks, I think I’m gonna do it! It sounds like a whole lot of fun and something that will help in the future. Knowing how to do this is important, and good. 
Appreciate the support, this forum really is amazing. Might be worth noting that you will all be seeing more of me in the future when I struggle with the setup haha…
Where can we connect outside of this forum? Do you have Twitter? I’m @TPBHQ, let’s follow each other, I would love to ask some other questions privately before I make the switch.
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I’m sure you are more than welcome to PM anyone here … feel free if you get stuck. Always an opportunity to learn!
But don’t be shy of posting support issues publicly as remember this may help others with similar problems. Everyone starts somewhere, so nothing is too silly to ask. Also that may get you an answer quicker if one individual is busy. Obviously do exhaust search first if you can.
btw for the record I use Scaleway, Sparkpost and AWS.
Learning AWS is also a guaranteed CV sharpener! (and compared to a lot of the domain hosting options is one of the more ‘professional’ solutions if a little more complex as a result).
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Are you able to type in your email address when prompted? If so, you know everything you need to know to set up SSL on a dedicated VM running Discourse 
It’s literelly that easy because Discourse has an integration with Let’s Encrypt.
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You don’t use Digital Ocean, you use Scaleway and AWS?
I’ve used Sparkpost before for SMTP configs, but did I misunderstand your message? Are you not hosting on Digital Ocean? Would you recommend Scaleway in that case?
I would recommend Scaleway and that’s who I use for my VPS layer, but there are many great options, including DO.
I use AWS for:
- domain registration and config (Route 53)
- incoming email & redirection (SES)
- S3 storage (Discourse has sensible integration to this)
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Scaleway is extremely cheap. Their plans have a lot of SSD storage. Is it simple to install their WordPress app, because they also list it as a one-click install?
(+ Scaleway servers are overpowered for the same price as you would pay for something underpowered on Digital Ocean)
Can’t vouch for this, as I’m not (yet) a Wordpresser 
Defer to others …
They are certainly good value.
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Have you checked out our services? We offer managed Discourse hosting for an affordable price. https://www.communiteq.com/pricing/
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$20/month is a big jump from $5/month, not sure that’s applicable in this specific case, where the OP is asking for the absolute lowest cost solution.
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I stopped reading there I guess
No, J/K - I read it all and then I went back to the original question)
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The baseline was shared PHP hosting which is as low as it gets, pricing wise.
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But that’s only for PHP apps and they use a stack that doesn’t support Discourse or Ghost so it’s not what I’m looking for.
I read something about why they are able to price their servers so cheaply. Apparently, they cut corners with hardware and they are extremely underpowered. I’m not sure if that was a while ago and if that information is accurate but if it is, then I think I’ll go for DO.
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Go for it.
Just so you know, however, I have had a year and half of Production of 2 sites and stability is superb, they’ve never let me down. Not once had to call support.
Never had an issue with performance either.
They have also implemented 2FA logons which is great for security.
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That is good to hear, which plan do you recommend?
For reference, the article I was talking about is this one: Why is Scaleway so cheap compared to for instance: DigitalOcean? | Hacker News
Not exactly conclusive? Just someone’s opinion? I have had a good experience and minimising ongoing costs is important to me.
The industry has had a bit of a shake-up in the last couple of years or so and there has been a lot of downward pressure on prices.
My machines are 2 Core, 2 GB x86 numbers with 50GB and unmetered @ 200Mb/s I believe - these are €2.99 a month each. (VC1S)
I use one of these as a dev server too, so I have a total of 3 rented.
Its relatively straightforward to migrate if you ever need to, so I wouldn’t worry too much. You can simply spin one up, configure it, test it out and if at any stage you are not happy you can delete it and only pay for the time you used it for!
My busy Production site has daily backups going to S3. I could rebuild to a completely new location in a day I reckon.
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