I am wondering how this whole forum thing was created. @nick Can you elaborate on what you did in order to get this thing setup?
Wow what an honor! I’m not gonna shy on explanations - so beginners can learn too:
We first started a digital ocean account, which is a platform on which you can host any application you want on a private dedicated server for as little as $5 a month. This whole forum is running on the lowest tier and probably will be for a while, as the lowest tier is good enough for most general webapp needs! Digital Ocean even has a one-click option to spin up a Discourse forum straight away and just has you set up the forum itself, without needing to touch the server much.
Next we created an account on mailgun, which is a email relay service that has a pretty decent free tier of up to 10,000 emails a month.
Third, we use netlify for DNS (domain name system) configuration - but netlify itself is a full-fledged web-app suite that you can use to do a lot more. For DNS features I’d also recommend cloudflare if you don’t need any other application features, or whatever DNS features come with your domain host itself!
So we have our domains pointing at both of the above services (both sites provide tutorials for this) and next we need to set up the forum itself - which Digital Ocean provides a simple tutorial for finishing the setup of your server - it involves connecting remotely to your server over SSH to configure it through a terminal.
Some of these steps have a bunch of extra required prerequisite knowledge, but I’m happy to answer more questions in the comments that follow!
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Thank you for sharing the detailed process of creating this forum! It’s insightful to see the steps involved in setting up such a platform. For those interested in further topics related to technology and development, I’d recommend checking out this article on finding programmers by Cleveroad. It provides valuable insights into the process of hiring skilled developers. Thanks for the informative post