Can you share some links to your sites? I would for one love to see your work, but also to see how they load and all. I think Scaleway will be more than sufficient for me, I was just leaning towards Digital Ocean because they’ve got a bit of a name in the industry so I felt more comfortable going for them. You do though get more than what you do with Digital Ocean in terms of price, so it seems like a no-brainer.
I’ll PM you one of them
and for that name you pay. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that, but if you’re looking for low price without serious performance issues, there are better options. Hetzner is not so well known internationally but also quite cheap yet good quality. When you search for the various provider names here, you will find plenty of information, test results and what not. Remember that CPU performance makes a difference with discourse.
Oh, sorry. It’s been one and a half yeard since I looked at serverpilot when I was in exactly the same situation as you and my understanding was that you can use it as a kind of cpanel alternative, regardless of what you’re doing with that server. Maybe I misunderstood. Anyway, I agree with everyone else that you should go ahead and manage your own server.
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Yeah ServerPilot has changed quite a bit to my knowledge. I’m now only considering two options
- Digital Ocean + ServerPilot (and self managing bcs certain things can’t be done with ServerPilot)
- DreamHost’s Fully Managed VPS, which said they would be able to install both Discourse.org and Ghost.org. (VPS Hosting | Fully Managed Virtual Private Servers – DreamHost)
I would love to know if anyone has any experience with the above two setups, please let post them here!
Since you’re running more than just discourse on that server, their cheapest option won’t suffice. So you’re looking at $27.50 per month. In that case, i.e. if the managed thing is so important for you, I’d seriously consider the $20 option from Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting) and look elsewhere for Ghost hosting (never looked into that, but I assume there are similar options as for WordPress?). There is no need whatsoever for your blog to be running on the same server as your forum.
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Yes, I was looking at the $27.50/mo plan. I think it’s a reasonable amount of money to pay for what you get. Plus it comes with email and everything that I had from my previous host, so it won’t theoretically be a downgrade.
I know that there isn’t necessarily a reason for them to be on the same server, which is why for now I will be moving my existing WordPress sites to the DreamHost plan, and when I launch a forum I will purchase hosting from D.O just for that.
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If I were you, I would dive in and rent a VPS for a few days, have a go at setting a Discourse instance up yourself (self-host) and you may find things go better than you expect.
The worst that can happen is you learn something and spend at most $1 (that kind of training would cost you much much more)
If you tie yourself into $27 or so a month that’s a big spend for your first year.
btw Ghost follow a very similar model to Discourse - again this is something you can self administer for a significant saving (though I can’t vouch for the ease of set-up and maintenance they are a lot newer platform, but the concepts will be very similar - its even an Ember based web app!).
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I see your point however it would t be my first year. I have sites that need to be migrated and I wanted to avoid downtime.
I did a lot of reading about managing a droplet and apparently there’s a lot more to it then just setting it up. Although the setup is one thing, you also need to focus on hardening the security of your server. While, if I go with a managed server that’s all done for me, and they also provide email hosting on top of that.
I don’t know, I’ll have another think about it and make the choice by the day I have to migrate. Thanks a lot for your help, don’t hesitate to post anything else that could sway my opinion one way or another, it would be a great help!!
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My point is you don’t need to use your instance, but you may be more informed once you have your instance up and running.
Also, the Discourse team clearly spend a lot of time making their software easy to upgrade and configure, its a pleasure to administer.
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If you’re willing to spend that amount for “less worries”, I think I think I’d put that money into discourse hosting rather than server management cause that’s where you are much more likely to encounter issues.
Maybe I’m naïve, but for the average (or below) website, where there is no reason to assume that it will become the target of serious hacker attacks, there is not that much to take care of security wise and there are plenty of tutorials for that around. I have previously considered managed options and eventuall decided against it, also because I felt that having others take care of things for you also entails limitations. I don’t remember any examples for managed servers but in the case of hosted discourse there is usually a limitation on which/how many plugins you can install.
Another consideration was that virtually all relevant tutorials out there are assuming that you are managing your server yourself. On a managed server I’d always be wondering whether the tutorial is applicable to my situation on a managed server.
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Instead of spending any money, I would first build a local VM (inside Vagrant for example) with all the services applied onto one host and see if I can handle/troubleshoot all the things. Then it comes to distribution specifics, and requirements by the software itself. I read that Ghost runs with PHP, which minimum version should it have. Maybe it already has a Docker image, similar to Discourse, and can be managed the same way (meaning to say, the host system just needs Docker, and upgrade maintenance is done in containers).
Seems it has - Docker Hub
TL;DR - evaluate whether all your websites can run on the same host, and how much resources you’d expect them to give.
Example of mine: Fresh Discourse with 5 months history, 1k users, 10k posts runs side by side with a read-only archive of Woltlab, 17k users, 250k posts, heavily tuned MySQL with innodb buffer pool size of 2 GB in memory.
Everything inside Docker containers, 4 CPUs, 8 GB RAM. Discourse PGSQL gets 2GB shared buffers for performance reasons (well, and because I needed on 6 GB RAM but got the 8 GB plan).
One problem: If one decides to ddos the archive, the main site suffers too. Still, I’ve got other problems when a ddos hits the data center.
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LOL this is how far I’ve gotten so far: http://discuss.studyclick.net
But it crashed all of the other sites on my droplet 
It’s possible to run more than one site on a single ‘droplet’ (or equivalent), but probably easier to separate them if you can and the configuration will be simpler … also you can migrate and bring them up and down independently more easily …
If you insist on piggyback, this Topic covers it:
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I tried a similar tutorial and it crashed both my sites. Thank god I had backups. Maybe because it was Nginx, not Apache.
Given you were considering a more expensive hosting option, I’d go with one droplet per app and it will probably still work out lots cheaper 
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Yeah and safer. Easier to backup etc. will hold off on it for a while but sounds like the plan.