Discourse hosting options (and how to chose one)

Documentation
1

Discourse is awesome, but it can be hard for people without specific technical knowledge to get the most out of it. My clients hire me largely because I know how to bend Discourse to their needs. A critical decision that must be made from the start is how to host Discourse. Unlike many other services, Discourse is truly open source so there are many options.

Summary of the options

Option Monthly Cost Domain Support Plugins
Discourse Starter $20 discourse.group Email support 7
Discourse Standard $100 Custom Email support 16
Discourse Business $300 Custom Priority email support 26
Communiteq Starter $20 Custom Email support 14
Communiteq Professional $49 Custom Email support 19
Communiteq Business $99 Custom Email support Unlimited
Literate Computing Dashboard[1] $37 Custom Expert support Unlimited
DigitalOcean Droplet[2] $12 Custom Community support Unlimited
Amazon Lightsail[3] $10 Custom Community support Unlimited

Discourse and Communiteq are traditional hosting services that take care of everything. DigitalOcean and Amazon just offer virtual servers and you’ll need to take care of installing and maintaining Discourse. Literate Computing sits in-between: Discourse installation and maintenance is included, but you’ll need to do a little work setting up DNS, a Droplet and Mailgun.

Discourse Starter[4] is a great option for people, well, starting a group. The main restrictions are that it’s hosted on the discourse.group domain and there can only be two staff accounts.[5] $20 a month is a reasonable price and puts Discourse in the same range as the lowest price from Communiteq.

Communiteq is a well regarded alternative. Obviously they have lower prices and are based in the European Union, which might be important for some communities. I don’t have any personal experience with them.

Nor do I have any experience with Amazon Lightsail. DigitalOcean is the default suggestion for Discourse servers.

Decision flowchart

flowchart TD
    Q1{{"`Are you comfortable using SSH?`"}}--Yes -->A1[Consider self-hosting]
    Q1 -- No -->Q2{{"`Are you ok with managing DigitalOcean, MailGun and your DNS?`"}}
    Q2 -- Yes --> A2[Literate Computing]
    Q2 --  No --> Q3{{"`Do you prefer support from the company that makes Discourse?`"}}
    Q3 -- Yes --> A3[Discourse]
   Q3 -- No --> A4[Communiteq]

  1. I calculated this based on $300 a year for the “Rebuilds When You Need” package, plus a $12/month Droplet. Might be a bit more if you send out a lot of emails. Jay also says a $6/month Droplet works for smaller sites. ↩︎

  2. You can pick different sizes for different costs. This is what I consider to be a minimum configuration. ↩︎

  3. Again this assumes at least 2 GB memory. ↩︎

  4. This tier replaced Discourse Basic which was little unusual in that it was limited to 100 members who must be invited to join. It wasn’t open to the public and seemed intended for small groups or for bootstraping a community. I’m offering a similar service at no cost. ↩︎

  5. That is moderators and/or admins. ↩︎

2

I poked into this because it seemed odd to be so limiting but there’s two things that make it workable:

  • there’s an additional non-staff moderator role, which allows moderation privileges by category - Category Mods.
  • there’s an additional non-staff role to allow user management by group - Group Owners.

The only issue is that finding out about these roles - particularly Group Owner - requires a bunch of digging. I have asked them to make the Group Owner role easier to find, though. That discussion (and what led to this answer) is on the Discourse Meta.

The Group Owner concept and changes are relatively new and are discussed in a post from October 2023.

1 Like