Message boards

[Spud1]

I have used Invision power board (free version) for years with no problems. very easy to set up and customise, and looks great. The best board I have ever run has to be vBulliten ( as used here i believe) for useablilty, looks, number of hacks (quick reply etc), but it costs a fortune for the licence

As for hosting, I use www.web-mania.co.uk - 20 quid a year with mysql/perl/php/12gig traffic etc etc, reliable and fast with ssh access

[Taz]

Okay, thanks for all the responses. I want to set up a message board for a particular car (like an enthusiasts' board) so it's nothing major but I do want to do a decent job of it.

The web-mania hosting looks pretty good at £20+VAT per year with 12GB usage per month.

[pp05]

Okay, just so I understand this correctly (as i've only built simple static sites before linking to external free message board sites). If I want to have my own site that includes a fully customisable message board embedded within the site then I will need the following:

1. A domain name (DNS pointing to hosting company) - this I already have.
2. A hosting company providing Web space with MySql support (eg. 3DPixelNet) - £
3. One of the free board software packages installed in the Web space - free.

Is that correct? So the only cost will be the annual renewal of the domain name and the annual hosting costs?

With hosting companies pay monthly. If your host isn't up to it you can simply move. Within hosting package a lot of them offer scripts to install the forums so you can be up and running within a minute or so. Then you can apply whatever look etc

[DavidM]

Within hosting package a lot of them offer scripts to install the forums so you can be up and running within a minute or so. Then you can apply whatever look etc

Make sure you get the latest versions of the forum in case the version provided has any security issues.

[0iD]

let it die in peace.

[Saracen]

As this has now been closed, because it's an old thread, I won't say much. This is just perspective for anyone reading it, since it's been brought back up.

But I would add one perspective. In my opinions, forums don't necessarily gobble either bandwidth or space. Whether they do that depends entirely on how many members you have, and how you configure them as to what content they contain. Clearly, anything that's graphics-heavy can get quite demanding, and as forums grow in thousands, or tens of thousands, of members then yes, demands can get to be substantial.

But probably the biggest single issue isn't space of bandwidth .... it's that they can be quite processor intensive. As soon as you get an active forum with a good few members, all the standard forum functions (post, display, search, etc) start to generate a LOT of queries. Most decent forum software is database driven, and just about anything you do generates a series (and sometimes, long series) of queries to build the page you see.

So if you get hundreds of people doing it simultaneously, it is a LOT of simultaneous queries being handled.

Most cheaper hosting packages are cheap because they've got a lot of people using them. If they're all simple, personal-page type sites, you can get a lot on a single machine with minimal impact on each other. But as soon as one starts running a busy forum, the impact on other users of that server gets to be significant, and the hosting company will start to get complaints. And that is why forums aren't popular on many cheap sites.

So starting off on a cheap package, doing the development work and getting it running will probably be fine. Starting to build a userbase will be fine. But assuming the forum is successful (not an easy thing to do these days, by the way), the time will come (and possibly quite quickly) where you'll be moving to a more expensive account, like a decent virtual server. If it continues to expand, sooner or later it'll require a dedicated server, but with most forums, you ought to be talking in terms of quite some thousands of users before that becomes necessary, as most won't be online simultaneously.

So a typical profile might be :-

Stage 1 - cheap hosting. Maybe up to a few hundred users.

Stage 2 - virtual server. Maybe £30-£50/month. Okay for some thousands of users.

Stage 3 - Dedicated server. From about £50/month (unmanaged) up to, well, quite a lot depending on needs.

Stage 4 - If you end up with a REALLY big forum, multiple servers, with functions split across them.

Oh, and one last point. I'm not talking from a perspective of anything to do with Hexus hosting. I have nothing to do with that. I have run, and been involved with, forums elsewhere, though.