Fully Managed Discourse Hosting
Fully managed Discourse hosting means EasyCloudify provisions, secures, updates, monitors and backs up your Discourse stack on the cloud provider and region of your choice — so you can use Discourse without operating servers. One-click deploy, free SSL, daily backups, automatic patching, and 24/7 human support, from $5/mo.
Free assisted migration · 13 datacenter regions · No per-seat fees
Everything we manage on your Discourse stack
You focus on using Discourse. We operate the underlying cloud, the OS, the runtime and the Discourse application itself.
One-click Discourse deployment
Spin up a production-ready Discourse instance in under 60 seconds in any of our 13 datacenter regions across Europe, the Americas and Asia-Pacific — with GDPR-ready regions in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London.
Automatic updates & patching
We track upstream Discourse releases, test compatibility, and roll out updates inside a maintenance window you control. Major upgrades include a rollback path.
Daily backups + one-click restore
Block-level, crash-consistent snapshots of your Discourse data with 7-day retention (configurable down to every 4 hours). Restore to any point in time from the dashboard.
Hardened security baseline
Free SSL on every domain, WAF + DDoS protection, TLS 1.3, AES-256 at rest, hardened OS images, automated CVE patching. GDPR / SOC 2-aligned with EU data residency options.
24/7 proactive monitoring
Health checks, log aggregation, auto-restart on failure, and pager-style alerting on the Discourse processes — not just the underlying VM.
Real human support, < 15 min
Our engineers know Discourse. No tier-one chatbots — you get direct access to people who have deployed and tuned Discourse hundreds of times.
Why teams choose Discourse
Discourse is an open source Internet forum and mailing list application.
Description
Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. Use it as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more!
Software Included
| Package | Version | License |
|---|---|---|
| Discourse | latest | GPL 2 |
| Docker CE | 19.03.12 | Apache 2 |
Getting started after deploying Discourse
Before you begin with your Discourse 1-Click App, you will need:
- Credentials for an SMTP server. These credentials are critical for account creation and for receipt of notifications in Discourse.
If you have an existing mail server, you can use those credentials. If you don't have or want to run a mail server, there are several providers where you can set up an SMTP account, such as SparkPost, Mailgun, Mailjet, or Mandrill.
-
A hostname (domain or subdomain). You’ll use this for your forum; you cannot use an IP address with Discourse.
-
An email address to use for the Discourse admin account.Additionally, Discourse requires at least 2GB of RAM, so make sure to choose a plan with enough memory during creation.After creating a Discourse One-Click Droplet, you'll need to connect to the Droplet via SSH to complete the setup.ssh root@your_pod_public_ipv4 Once you connect, you'll be prompted to complete Discourse's configuration by entering the three details mentioned earlier: an email address for the admin account, the domain or subdomain for Discourse, and the SMTP server credentials.
To get started, the following configuration details will be required.
- Email Address for the Discourse Admin Account
- The hostname (domain or subdomain) you will use for Discourse
- Details for the SMTP server your Discourse install will use to send email
- Email Address to use if you wish to set up a LetsEncrypt SSL certificate
If you want to skip the initial Discourse setup, you can press CTRL+C. The next time you log in, you’ll be prompted again. Alternatively, you can re-run the setup script any time by running bash /opt/digitalocean/setup_discourse.sh.
Once you have provided the requested information to the setup script it will take approximately 10 minutes for the script to install and configure the latest version of Discourse on your pod.
Once you’ve completed the initial Discourse setup, you can create a Discourse account on the new forum by visiting the hostname you chose in your browser.
Enabling HTTPS
We strongly recommend using SSL to secure the connection between the Discourse server and the clients connecting to it. Discourse provides the following resources on setting up SSL:
Why run Discourse on EasyCloudify instead of self-hosting?
- Self-hosting Discourse works — until a CVE drops, a disk fills up, or an upgrade breaks the schema. We absorb that risk for you.
- Migrating off Elestio? Same 1-click Discourse catalog, broader managed services, 24/7 human support and plans from $5/mo.
- No vendor lock-in: your Discourse data is yours, in your chosen region, exportable at any time.
- Unified billing across compute, databases, storage and email — one invoice, one dashboard.
- Inbound bandwidth is always free, SSL is always free, backups are always included.
Fully managed Discourse — answered
What does "fully managed Discourse" actually mean?
Fully managed Discourse means EasyCloudify operates the entire stack on your behalf: server provisioning, OS hardening, Discourse installation and configuration, SSL, daily backups, security patches, version upgrades, monitoring, log aggregation and 24/7 incident response. You focus on using Discourse; we keep it healthy.
How much does managed Discourse hosting cost?
Plans start at $5/mo for our serverless tier and from $5/mo for a dedicated VPS suitable for Discourse. Larger workloads scale up to multi-region high-availability setups. There are no per-seat fees, inbound bandwidth is free, and SSL and backups are always included.
Can I migrate my existing Discourse install to EasyCloudify?
Yes. Free assisted migration is included on every plan. Our team replicates your existing Discourse data (from Elestio, DigitalOcean, AWS, self-hosted or anywhere else), validates the cutover in staging, schedules a maintenance window with you, and stays on standby for 24 hours after go-live.
Where can I deploy Discourse?
You can deploy Discourse in any of our 13 datacenter regions across Europe, the Americas and Asia-Pacific (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, New York ×2, San Francisco ×2, Atlanta, Richmond, Toronto, Singapore, Bangalore, Sydney). You choose the region for data residency; we run the stack identically with the same SLAs everywhere.
Do you handle Discourse version upgrades?
Yes. Minor versions are patched automatically during the maintenance window you configure. Major versions are reviewed by our engineers, tested against your data in staging where applicable, and rolled out with a guaranteed rollback path.
Is EasyCloudify a good Elestio alternative for Discourse?
Yes — EasyCloudify is a true Managed Services Provider, which means our engineers take proactive ownership of your Discourse stack (monitoring, scaling, security, maintenance) instead of leaving day-2 ops to you. Plans start at $5/mo (vs $11/mo on Elestio), and you also get a native serverless platform, managed databases, S3-compatible storage and business email under one dashboard. See our full Elestio alternative comparison.
Other fully managed apps
We manage popular open-source apps the same way. Here are a few related to Discourse.
Deploy fully managed Discourse in 60 seconds
We handle the cloud. You ship with Discourse. From $5/mo, with free migration from your current host.