It’s been a while since we’ve made a blog entry, and even though it may seem like we’re inactive, things are buzzing in the back end. However, this entry isn’t about us or our posting frequency. This article will feature a personal review and a spotlight shined at DiscourseHosting.com, one of our favorite hosting companies. First, let’s make one thing clear. We were not paid to write this, we do not get any commission from referrals, nor do we get compensated in any other way. This is a genuine overview of DiscourseHosting.com based on our two years of hosting our projects with them. And yes, not every day do people get up and write a blog post about another company without incentives. For us, the incentive is the amazing service and exceptional customer service DiscourseHosting.com provides.

First things first, what is Discourse and why does it need hosting?

Discourse is an open-source Internet forum and mailing list management software application founded in 2013 by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward, and Sam Saffron. From a usability perspective, Discourse breaks with existing forum software by including features recently popularized by large social networks, such as infinite scrolling, live updates, expanding links, and drag and drop attachments. You can read more about this fantastic piece of software on their official Wikipedia page. In layman’s terms, Discourse makes traditional forums fun and easy to use. Old forum software like vBulletin or phpBB does not compare in terms of speed, features, and general ease of use.

But, it’s not all pretty!

Yes, Discourse is easy and fun to use, to the end-user. To a non-technical webmaster trying to manage things on the back end, not so much. In fact, in our personal opinion, the software is extremely hard to use and maintain on the back end. It’s very easy to break something and you need to know your way around the technology behind it. If you don’t know what Ember or Ruby on Rails is, then you most likely won’t have a good time running your Discourse forum. This is where Discourse Hosting comes in to save the day! The company offers managed instances of Discourse forum software, which means you don’t have to worry about a thing other than the settings in your admin panel (and getting users to sign up).

DiscourseHosting.com Pros

  • One-click installs. You can launch multiple forum instances with a few clicks. Their friendly staff will guide you with connecting your forum to your domain.
  • Knowledgable staff. Broken plugin? Did something go haywire on your forum? These guys can fix anything.
  • Superb customer support. DiscourseHosting.com answers day and night, and quite often, weekend response times are just as quick as during the week.
  • They go above and beyond for their customers. Some of the projects we manage with DiscourseHosting.com were targeted by hackers and malicious users. In each instance, their staff helped us mitigate the problem.
  • Speed. They make sure your instance is fine-tuned and runs like a well-oiled machine. The uptime is also amazing. We don’t have exact numbers, but we don’t recall a downtime other than scheduled maintenance.
  • Affordability. The value you get for the prices they offer make DiscourseHosting.com the best choice to get if you plan to run Discourse for your projects.

DiscourseHosting.com Cons

This will sound hard to believe, but we honestly can’t find any faults. I guess sometimes (and we sincerely mean sometimes as in a rare occurrence), they take a little too long to respond on holidays/weekends. But again, this only makes us look bad for saying this, as we all deserve a break. But we had to find something negative, and this was the only thing that came to mind.

 

To recap, if you’re reading this, you’re most likely looking for a place to run your Discourse forum. Don’t hesitate and give DiscourseHosting.com a try, we guarantee you that you will not be disappointed.