My experience in hosting Forem for others.

It's been a while I posted something on Forem. Most of the time, I used to write posts under the tags selfhost, t2d, and creatorwalkthroughs for helping beginners to install Forem. But today, I would like to share something different; An experience and opportunity that Forem has spurred within me.

A few months ago, I was working on a script called t2d, aka talk to dokku. The main objective of this project/script is to reduce the repetition process that I tend to do a lot, i.e., installing open-source software like:

• Ghost blog
• WordPress
• Commento
• Open VPN
• Tailscale
• Portainer
• Mastodon
• Caprover

and there are many which I don't even remember. All I want to do is preserve the installation procedure I followed and make it more reusable.

Then I came across Forem, which I was always obsessed with self-hosting but failed miserably. I even took an Udemy course on Ruby On Rails to understand how Forem works. I raised many issues, learned from other contributors and on one fine day, I installed Forem successfully. Hooray xD!!

Unexpected Roadmap towards selfhost.dev

Now, I started integrating this Forem self-hosting procedure into my t2d script, and it went well. In fact, This laid foundation for my ongoing project, i.e., selfhost (under construction)

Many people reached out to me for help in self-hosting Forem, some via comments, some via Forem connect, and some via email. And today is the day I've got my 10th customer and successfully installed Forem for all the ten customers, on the price they fixed; it ranged from 75 to 150 USD for one-time installation.

Even though the customer base was small, continuous requests from others, contacting various people and learning about their needs and providing them what they need upon something I can deliver seems like a rollercoaster for me.

Even before the release of v0 of selfhost.dev I had found ten customers based upon Forem. I consider this as my first milestone towards a new dream of mine.