I'm sorry it was difficult to get Discourse up and running! If it helps, I'd be glad to throw in a free Digital Ocean $20/month droplet -- I can set it up foll

I'm sorry it was difficult to get Discourse up and running! If it helps, I'd be glad to throw in a free Digital Ocean $20/month droplet -- I can set it up following our guide at http://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under-30-minutes/ http://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under... and then hand it over to you for everything else. We also have a special Mandrill reseller code so we can give you a Mandrill account with 50k emails/month as part of the package. Just email us at team@discourse.org and I'll make it happen. (Obviously I am a fan, because PHP fractals, man.) Yes, this will require Docker, which means a 64-bit OS and a modern Linux kernel. We initially tried supporting arbitrary Discourse installs but it quickly became a support nightmare for our small 7 person team. We adopted Docker because we saw it as the only way forward to have sane support both internally (for hosting) and externally. We are all-in on Docker, for what it's worth. I'd argue Rails has historically had very little incentive to support super easy server installs; how many large open source Rails projects can you even name? Certainly 37signals nee Basecamp isn't too concerned about how hard it is to install their webapps on a server... Long term, the only real solution is VPS and Docker. I think that has a lot of other benefits for the whole hosting ecosystem, too -- it opens the door to not just Rails deployments but all kinds of alternatives.