Many times when I've wanted to install something for my needs, like forum engine or something similar, I was looking only for an PHP option.
Why?
Because it really is a copy-paste process with typing credentials to your database into dedicated file. No need to know any language/framework-specific commands, and no need to be overwhelmed by missing dependencies.
And in huge addition to that, simple PHP hosting is extremely cheap - for years I've been paying for my personal server ~$20 PER YEAR, where servers that enables you to use Node/Ruby etc. costs around at least $10 per month. This is a huge game changer for me.
Discourse is a pretty complicated piece of software (relatively). They do:
mailing list,
discussion forum,
long-form chat room,
This isn't gonna be some static blog, it's feature heavy. It needs redis, it needs some real-time chat capabilities etc etc. Also the choice to use a framework (Rails in this instance) was sound since it's complicated. So when comparing deployments you need to compare it to the php equivalent (Laravel). I think deployment and memory footprint are gonna be quite similar then.
Many times when I've wanted to install something for my needs, like forum engine or something similar, I was looking only for an PHP option.
Why?
Because it really is a copy-paste process with typing credentials to your database into dedicated file. No need to know any language/framework-specific commands, and no need to be overwhelmed by missing dependencies.
And in huge addition to that, simple PHP hosting is extremely cheap - for years I've been paying for my personal server ~$20 PER YEAR, where servers that enables you to use Node/Ruby etc. costs around at least $10 per month. This is a huge game changer for me.