We have just 4 announcements left and we’ve saved the best for last in every sense. In case you took a digital siesta this weekend you can catch up with all of the awesome through the tenreasons category. We’ve made a lot of small and large improvements to the core of what we do, but…
Originally published at: Ten Reasons to Reclaim #4: Towards better Discourse – Reclaim Hosting
We’ve also swapped out the comment area of our blog to use this Discourse forum so that each post we write brings the discussion here and feeds back to the blog.
hot holy frioles this is cool. And I don’t really like discussion forums.
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well this answers sooo many questions. I’d seen your handy work on connectedcourses and got as far as finding the discourse code. I can now safely remove ‘install discourse’ and ‘play with discourse’ from the todo 
You probably aren’t surprised that Smallest Federated Wiki is on my wishlist for managed software hosting. I’m not sure how you arrived at the $10/month price point for discourse, but it seems steep. I’m running an SFW wiki farm on a small digitalocean droplet and it’s only costing me $5/month. It did require some setup time and CLI voodoo, but past a certain point these are sunk costs.
We’re definitely looking at SFW as an option, but part of the idea of the managed software options are that we’re gravitating towards the software platforms that a lot of people want but don’t want to manage. Right now out of the 4 people I know running SFW, all of them are more than capable of managing a VPS on their own. To compare we get requests almost every week about Discourse and the majority requesting it haven’t experimented beyond using Installatron to install software. That being said SFW might come up with a different announcement before the week is out :).
Regarding price Discourse requires a minimum of 1GB of memory to run which would make the cost comparable to running at Digital Ocean, but of course with Digital Ocean there’s no one managing your server for you and handling the installation and upgrades.
Your assessment of my sysadmin skills is probably overgenerous, but I see your point. That reminds me that I need to figure out how to upgrade SFW.
Now that we’ve announced it formally, this is where I see things like SFW fitting into the mix. We will most likely be building a template for that as well as many other types of software since this now removes any restrictions that the shared servers would have had.