Although I'm not familiar with Discourse self-hosted, I would wager that it's just like any other forum, in terms of resource needs. VPS will work better, but for small projects shared may suffice.
The requirements are Ruby, Redis, PostgreSQL, so a lot of generic shared cPanel hosts probably will not work.
I do see that
A2 Hosting currently offers it, and they're an excellent hosting company.
Many more people run it on VMs, everything from a cheap DigitalOcean droplet, to better VPS plans from hosts like
Namecheap,
LiquidWeb, and others.
Budget matters. What's the budget.
But be realistic.
