I wanted to move to Discourse because it was modern and neat, but self-hosting it was just a non-starter. It's got so many dependencies, obscure installation and runtime things, and importing data from an existing forum - even if you have one - took forever. And the result didn't run very fast.
After struggling to get it to run and import our existing forum data, I just shrugged and went for Xenforo, which just works. And without all the shit that happened with its predecessor, vBulletin, and its split / recommercialization and rebuild to OOP-style PHP at the cost of performance.
I have no clue what's going on with it though, it doesn't seem to get much updates / developer activity.
I've found that self-hosting the docker version is really straightforward. If you're on digital ocean, they even have a prefab droplet.
It does run better on droplets that are one up from the smallest $5/mo flavor. Some version upgrades will require a couple minutes of downtime if your system is memory constrained: but all the upgrades are done via the web UI or a single terminal command on the droplet.
After struggling to get it to run and import our existing forum data, I just shrugged and went for Xenforo, which just works. And without all the shit that happened with its predecessor, vBulletin, and its split / recommercialization and rebuild to OOP-style PHP at the cost of performance.
I have no clue what's going on with it though, it doesn't seem to get much updates / developer activity.