Does anyone know what are the costs for hosting a platform with Discourse? We’d like to use it for our biofabrication forum. On the Discourse website there are mentions of $100/mo to $300/mo, although the numbers in those packages don’t mean much to me. Is that in the price range Edgeryders pays for hosting yourself?
There were talks at some point about whitelabelling the Edgeryders platform for other communities, how does that translate into cost reduction (for both Edgeryders and us)? Does this also entail the back-end for ethnograpic research (suppose that at some point the biofabrication forum could be used to research online citizen science)?
We pay 20 EUR per month for the Host Europe Linux Server Advanced 8.2 package, plus a few Euros a year for the domains, and that’s all. That server contains the edgeryders.eu website and about 10 other, smaller websites. The Discourse package prices are for “managed instances”, where you don’t have to care for setting up and updating the Discourse software.
In your case, if you want to self-host Discourse and not spend much effort on setup etc., a Docker based host like Digital Ocean seems a good idea. Because DIscourse is supplied as ready-to-install Docker images officially, while installing it yourself on a vanilla Linux system is possible but took us some time to figure out. Expect ~40 EUR/month for hosting with Digital Ocean.
We did not yet decide how we want to offer this service as a product. For small hosted communities like your forum, this does not require us to get a larger hosting package. So I would imagine that we only charge an initial fee for the whitelabelling setup and a per-hour rate in case any support / development / installation work is requested by the hosted community during the hosting. Plus some fee for community management services if you want us to provide that as well.
It’s available for your use in a whitelabelling setup, yes. Again, not sure if and how we want to charge for this, but be aware that it’s not yet a polished product that we can offer to clients more broadly. So if you are ready to play early adopter here, I guess this would help us as well to finish this part of our software setup more.
@winnieponcelet: for you guys, we are willing to go the extra mile and make it work.
I would suggest “whitelabelling 1”: same codebase + database as edgeryders.eu, access through your own domain, with your own logo/color scheme etc.
The advantage of that is that we only have to maintain the codebase + database once. This, yes, means you get Open Ethno in the package, and it gets maintained (and improved upon) with no extra effort.
@matthias already created a thorough description of the whitelabelling specifics, but they are in a private category. But maybe we can open it up, Matt? Or give Winnie access?
I prefer you just give Winnie access rather than entirely opening it up @matthias because we want to have maneuvering space in shaping the offer/negotiating with potential clients.