The other discourse I’m on says the costs are $68 a month. Dunno how the traffic compares of course.
Edit:on Digital Ocean apparently.
Same here @profk , more than happy to help if you need bodies to do basic stuff, but not got a lot of experience/know-how on this kind of thing
I’m happy to spin something up on Azure to try things out - Discourse have a handy set up guide for this too
Azure have a quite the array of price options depending on size of VM (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/virtual-machines/linux/#pricing)
The prices for Fasthosts VPS seem extremely cheap - their Cloud Servers are more inline with the Microsoft and other providers’ prices, so I’m wondering what the disadvantages of the VPS vs a Cloud Server are?
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Not my area of expertise but I wish you luck 
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Hi All
Sorry for not keeping up with all of this, struggling to address serious concerns of the past and not meaning to be absent but I also have a lot on for work.
I wondered if we need an agreed set of priorities to judge the server options by. I was thinking these feel key
- Security / Privacy considerations
- How we stress test to see if the server or price package will work (ie to avoid potentially it ending up costing more for any traffic spike or site crashing)
- Server maintenance time (this used to be a big thing, think the web has changed)
- any ethical or environmental concerns with the host vs cost
- what a sensible and manageable timeline would be to progress this given that I’m sure everyone has a lot of commitments
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The most fundamental difference is that with a VPS you’ve basically got only the half a dozen preselected combinations of cpu/memory/disk to choose from - want more Disk space? You’re gonna have to pay for another 2 CPU cores and 4GB of memory as well. You’ll usually have a 30 or 365 day contract for your server as well If you want to stop using a particular server then you’re stuck paying for it.- portability isn’t great with them as a result, but if they fit your needs they’re almost always cheaper.
With a Cloud Server, you choose your CPU, memory and disk requirements separately and are only billed for the time it’s running. You can usually take an OS image at any time and spin it up on a different sized machine if you’re hitting the limits of your machine or paying for stuff you’re not using which isn’t always the case with a VPS. But for an equivalent package, it’s usually more expensive.
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Yes, the Fasthosts VPS are really cheap which is why I suggested them originally. I moved some of my customers off a Fasthosts dedicated (classic) server and onto a mid-tier VPS a while ago, added Acronis backup and have had no issues whatsoever.
Unfortunately I spoke with Fasthosts earlier and they are not able to bypass the 12-month minimum VPS contract. This is kind of how they are so cheap, and distinguishes them from the flexibility (and scalability) that a dedicated cloud server can offer. Predictably they suggested that for a proof of concept we should look at spinning up a dedicated cloud server instead. That would still be a useful exercise, and would be roughly equivalent to using EC2 / Azure VM, but obviously wouldn’t prove the specific use case we want to test. I mentioned how Ionis (who are kind of their parent company) offer monthly contracts, but they said they are run fairly independently with their own policies and procedures etc.
In terms of the big beast cloud providers - does no harm at all spinning up on any / all of them, and I guess if we created new accounts we could potentially get more than enough free credits to pay for whatever we do as they all offer really generous amounts.
So all viable options we have discussed (of which we could / should pursue multiple)
- Fasthosts Cloud Server (pay per minute you use, no min term)
- Ionos VPS (pay per month, 1 month min term)
- Amazon EC2 (pay per minute, no min term)
- Amazon Lightsail (pay per minute, no min term)
- GCP Compute Engine (pay per minute, no min term)
- Azure VM (pay per minute, no min term)
- Digital Ocean (?,?)
With AWS, GCP, Azure you can create your resources in UK datacentres, not sure about Digital Ocean. Fashosts and Ionos are both in the UK.
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Thank you so much for looking into all this and being so through with your understanding of it.
One quick Q
Is this because it’s easier to speak to customer support or speed for users if it’s local or just that because of Brexit and tumbling pound, it’s better to use UK economy?
Now wondering if there’s an entire business in doing crowd funded servers but there’s probably a reason no one is doing that.
I’m assuming for testing purposes there’s no existing servers we can access, upgrade for a bit, and then downgrade?
FastHosts or others deffo don’t have a 30 day trial and pull the plug option?
But the customer support points is valid too - I’ve never had any issues with Fasthosts support over many years.
Not really but any of these options can be provisioned in a matter of seconds, and all apart from the VPS can be torn down just as quickly.
Fasthosts VPS does not, all the other options effectively do.
Think you were also asking about green credentials, and I noticed this on the Fasthosts website.
They use the same UK datacentre to Ionos so would apply to them too.
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if it’s just the fixed configurations then I’m still impressed by how much cheaper they can do it.
That’s amazing to see. I’m doing some podcasts on the environmental impact of music and I hadn’t really thought about various elements of an artists career and the media ecosystem (beyond streaming, obvs) that could be using renewables rather than carbon offsets.
Yeah I have used a lot of Azure and a bit of AWS when I’ve worked with large organisations, but for all the smaller clients there has never been anything close to a financial case for moving off Fasthosts (either classic dedicated servers or VPS).
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To look at it another way, what would be the smallest FastHosts package we’d need to host for a year? And are there any reasons this wouldn’t be the most stable and sustainable option going forwards? Do they have other Discourse servers running on there or even someone there who can whack one on as a test if it’ll mean several years of business from us?
Would I need to front the annual payment to get this off the ground?
It’s also the annual commitment - although often with Cloud Servers you can get hefty discounts for committing to longer terms. I think I got a 55% discount on AWS’ on-demand price by signing up to a 3 year commitment for the server I currently use for my website and for some configurations you can get as much as 75% off.
Can’t speak to Fasthosts, but AWS, GCP and Azure all have similar discounting schemes if you commit.
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Skimmed the first 20 odd posts and it seemed like a whole lot of nerd chat. Just wanted to say if @profk puts huge amounts of his own time into single handedly keeping the forums alive, don’t for a second let him think I’ll ‘thank’ or ‘appreciate’ him for it
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The smallest compatible Fasthosts VPS would be £5 per month so £60 for the year, although I probably wouldn’t recommend that given the amount of page / API requests being made. The top tier VPS is £24 per month so £288 for the year. You can pay for the year up front but this is not mandatory.
It wouldn’t include a backup solution, so that would add a small cost on top - could probably use Fasthosts Acronis backup solution, which is also pretty cheap. The nature of backups is actually another big distinction between Cloud servers and VPS.
We still need to know how much storage you’re currently using too. Discourse Business tier is up to 100GB but you are on the Enterprise tier which says 200GB plus - do you have any idea?
The only other cost I can think of is maybe SMTP for sending mail.
A big part of what you are paying Discourse for is a managed service - so if something goes wrong they will fix it, both reactively and proactively. They are responsible for the hosting platform and its health and security. If we self host it then it would be folks within the DiS community doing this on a voluntary basis - that is really where you are saving the biggest chunk.
I think we can do a proof of concept using an Ionos VPS and trust that if it is successful we can switch to the equivalent Fasthosts setup, as they are going to be the same from a technical perspective.
Here is what it looks like on Ionos:
They do mention a 30 day money back guarantee too.
Oh forgot to mention, if you do commit to 12 month contract with Ionos you get the first 6 months half price and there is no one-off setup fee.
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Not necessarily any reason why not, but there’s a bunch of ancillary stuff we haven’t talked about yet before we settle 100% on a host/solution:
- Do we need to separately provision an email server, or do we have access to one?
- Do we want to save images in cloud storage rather than on the server (I think you went through this with Discourse)
- What do backups look like - frequency, location, cost, ease to setup, security
- What does an upgrade look like - will there be downtime / more or less effort required
- Who has access to what? If the community are acting as system admins then some people will need to be trusted to have access to things they haven’t had before.
- What monitoring do we want to set up. Does anyone get alerted for issues? How? Do we want a rota system?
(I see @megalithicrock has already covered some of this 
)
With the best will in the world, I doubt they’d be willing to do this in the hope of £24 a month worth of business - it’s gonna be peanuts from their point of view.
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Yeah 100% - and there are only about 600 other UK sites using Discourse (vs around 30k using Joomla or 300k using WordPress prompting Fasthosts to have one-click setups for those products).
Given the concerns around sending mail, do we need this? Or is it for things like sign up emails and password reminders?