@eeeee said in Do you have limited or full access to your host?:
I did have this conversation previously with @phenomlab, and I recall we were looking at around $40 a month upwards for a dedicated host
If you're fine with Oracle and willing to ensure there is some constant load on your server (from my experience just running Mongo+Redis with some cache for NodeBB will do fine for their usage detection), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is still waving a huge free tier carrot in the form of 4 ARM64 cores w/24GB of RAM w/200GB total disk space (you can distribute these across up to 4VMs)
Otherwise - Hetzner has a great offer. NodeBB deployments are mostly RAM-bound, so I'd personally go for ARM here too - since NodeBB doesn't really have any x86-specific dependencies (also, if you want to save a buck, or rather €0.60, you can put an IPv6-only server behind Cloudflare and get IPv4 connectivity for free 🙂 ).
You really don't need dedicated unless you really have a lot of users - it may be worth it if you want to host many services (since you can run your own VMs there) or if you actually need a full CPU-worth of performance, but again - the heaviest part of NodeBB is typically the database (and maybe caches), you're almost certainly not using that much processing power to serve a forum 🙂
(As for the experience topic, I'm not sure if I can really comment when I'm still in my early 20s, below the lowest concrete number thrown here 😄 )