In reply to christicehurst.

I really don't think they're trying to force anything, if you look at their buy hosting page they don't even seem to publicly offer it yet.

Right now I'm only paying $10/month for a Digital Ocean droplet, with WPChat being the only thing running on it. It's ran pretty smoothly so far with a number of people already using it for discussions.

I'm sure I could've found a cheaper VPS but I'm already pretty comfortable with DO's system from another project. They recommend a number of other providers on their FAQ page.

Sure, Discourse will probably never power 22% of websites on the web. One of the reasons WordPress is so popular is because it's compatible with pretty much every hosting environment.

Although I admit I don't quite understand the inner-workings of Discourse which make the 1 GB recommended minimum requirement, I don't find it excessively unreasonable.