It's tricky but not impossible

The cover picture of this image has been taken from my Forem Local Instance(Development)

yes, it is possible to have a cover picture in Forem Development Instance.

I've been tagging along with Forem for almost a year now, and still understanding Forem and trying to implement it on my own is hard. Some devs are comfortable implementing, but it is pretty hard for some like me, who has no web development experience; I'm a cybersecurity professional.

Keeping these aside, I noticed that while reading the documentation of Forem was, it doesn't have a very steep learning curve; everything is documented but not in order, and it's not so beginner-friendly.

Recalling my experience, I'm about to write a simple guide that focuses more on organising the available documentation.

How I explored Forem till now.

1. Gitpod
2. Linux(Local) + Docker
3. Linux(VPS) + Docker
4. Playwithdocker + Forem
5. Linux + Manual Installation(Nothing more)
6. Heroku
7. Heroku with required Buildpacks and ENV variables
8. Linux + Manual + Production trials
9. Linux + manual + development(Full Working Condition)

Lately, I'm expecting some documentation related to production; in a few weeks or months. So I felt like this is the time for me to share my experience.

What is the purpose of writing my experience

I'm not a web dev but has experience in server configurations. So, this trial and error research has given me a reasonably good understanding of how Forem works.

I was able to have host Forem in both Development and Production, but soon I realised that I'm spending more than 75$ per month if I'm hosting on a production server of Heroku.

Yes, Heroku is fantastic. With Heroku, it is easy to automate and autoscale almost everything, but my usage of Forem is not about providing a platform(with a high emphasis on quality) for an existing community; it is about creating a new community. So thinking about the cost and quality benefits, I realised that hosting Forem on my own on a dedicated server of 4GB Ram and 250GB SSD would be more than enough for me.

I'm not sure about how others look into this, but there might be at least a few in line with my view. If you are one among them, stay tuned!