Where would you like them to send the bill. 
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All kidding aside, that’s really the crux of the issue. Setting a server with a software problem that’s causing resource issues to “auto scale” is a good way to get a huge bill. And I’d rather have a forum go down sometimes than have them give up because AWS sends them a $5000 monthly bill sometime in the future.
As a related example, I recall some old documentation referring to syslogd as a “remote disk filling service” if improperly configured. 
Well fair question. I knew this question would come. But still cost of owning and maintaining a server in the long run will still be more with growing demands. When designed well with auto scaling the costs can be much lower than running a beefed machine 24x7.
Again food for thought
- Ad Revenue
- More Power Users
- Voluntary funding from members
No you can set limits on auto scaling and also billing alerts. So you are not taken for a ride. Again this solution is if you want a good service. If you don’t mind forums going down occasionally then we should not be having this thread right 
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You bring up a good point concerning the cost of maintaining equipment for the long run.
I’ve spent tens of thousands on servers that were critical to my company. And I’ve dusted off an old Dell computer, installed Linux, some ram and storage for a team that were just trying out a new workflow. I spent money on things that would make money.
And as much as I use and enjoy this site, I don’t see how a 99.999% uptime would have much of a return on investment. But that’s not my decision to make.
The “Where . . . to send the bill” remark was meant, and hopefully received, as humor. If it offended you, I apologize.
Thanks @RosemaryOrchard for trading your sleep to keep things running. I used to keep a bag of chocolate covered espresso beans around to get me through the long nights when a reboot wouldn’t fix things. Sometime I also ate them on good days too. 
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@WayneG please don’t apologize. I knew you meant it for fun and as a joke. I didn’t take it in anyway otherwise. It was well received as a humor. 
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That would also require:
- The Discourse installation to be configured in a way that supports scaling across multiple instances. This probably means, at a minimum, running a second server/managed container instance for the DB but if the bottleneck is at the DB itself then you’re entering the world of Postgres replication or managed databases (and those do get pretty expensive pretty fast).
- The problem to be that peak [legitimate] load is too high for the server and not a misconfiguration or DDoS.
I’m sure you know this 
, but I feel it has to be noted that throwing it “in the cloud” is not a panacea.
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It’s all speculation at this point. Without proper diagnosis nothing can be said about it. I know cloud is not a solution for all. At the same time converse too. Uptime and QoS both are directly proportional to higher costs.
It just happened on a different Discourse forum I’m a part of.
Could this possibly be an issue with the Discourse software itself?
+1, I was unable to access the MPU Forum for 3 or 4 times in last 3 weeks.
Is the other forum self-hosted? Or is it hosted through Discourse?
We host it ourselves, not using their hosting (which considering how popular this forum is, would be prohibitively expensive).
What if we started a membership for the forum? Free access means you’ll at least have a forum that works weekdays, then one more tier gets you into the areas that has automatic refreshing of the server to not limit your access, and then another tier that allows you to tag the hosts and staff so you can berate them directly and publicly.
(j/k don’t do that)
Well I happen to be pretty familiar with scaling RoR apps, although I don’t have direct experience with Discourse. I would not venture to state what the problem is without taking a peek at the logs as I haven’t seen any 5xx errors --I’m living in Madrid, so different tz.
Just in case the admins need some help regarding RoR setups, I’d be happy to (and for free!).
They already offer “More Power Users” for $5/month so I guess they could restrict 24x7 access to paying members. How that would change the dynamic of the forum is anyone’s guess.
Members-only doesn’t sound good to me (and I’m a MorePU subscriber), but if there was a voluntary drive to earn something like a forum supporter badge, I’d contribute.
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No, no, no…they need to take the lesson from “free to play” games. Whenever the server crashes, just put up a splash screen that lets users know they’ve exhausted their views and they can pay $5 for more. Then use the payment notification from Paypal or Apple Pay or whatever to trigger an API call that reboots the server. 
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So if 5 people pay, then the servers reboots 5 times. Wooooo hooooooo
Endless reboots