Hello y'all

[SE]

Hello y'all
I'm new here so you all might have to keep me from bumping into walls and point me in the right direction. I'm on a quest for knowledge and thought this would be the place to get it. I'm the manager of a MSN Communities bbs and I think I want to go big time with it so here's the question. Where do I start?

I was refered over here by someone on the infopop web site. He said this was a good place for web hosting. I was looking at the hosting plans and was wondering how do I know which one would suit my needs? I have about 60 members on my MSN Communities site.

infopop has a demo download but they said I would need to get a host to make sure I could run it. I am not a computer wizz so go easy on me please...:)

[Dean B]

Originally posted by SE:
He said this was a good place for web hosting....
It doesn't get any better ;)

-Dean

[Tibbits]

There was someone who used to post both here and on Scriptkeeper. Was it Andy?

Infopop (formerly Madrona Park) sell UBB (which used to run the forums here) and also Opentopic (which is a remotely hosted solution).

They are now running VBulletin here, which you might want to look at too (personally I use Ikonboard, if for no other reason than I can't afford either of the other two)


SE: woo, Jimmy gourd:)

[Jeff]

FutureQuest is an excellent host - you will not be disappointed.

My advice would be to start with a basic or silver package and move up from there as your needs increase. Bandwidth and disk space will be the determining factors as your UBB grows. (with vBulletin you would have to start with a Gold account to have mySQL, but with UBB you can start small since you have no need for SQL.) It really depends on how many archived threads you keep, how active everyone is, how many guests you have on the board, etc. etc. But the good thing is that you can change packages as necessary by paying the difference in price, so you have nothing to lose.

[dank]

They are now running VBulletin here, which you might want to look at too (personally I use Ikonboard, if for no other reason than I can't afford either of the other two)
I've probably made the same recommendation previously, but... If vB is a consideration, then that implies you have a package that allows you MySQL access or would at least seriously consider upgrading to one. In which case, phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com/) would also be an option and would not have the cost which takes vB out of the running...

Dan

[Jeff]

Compared to ongoing costs of having a MySQL hosting account, the up front investment of $160 in vBulletin isn't that much. Not sure about the cost of UBB right now. But I do think there is an advantage to using a major product instead of a product like Ikonboard if you are really serious about developing your forum. I think it is important to make a good decision up front and not a decision just based on cost...

- how will he software be developed in the future? What direction is it heading in?

- will development of the software end in a few years, and if so, what might happen? Would your data be easy to migrate to another product if you had to? Will the user base insure that the software continues to be supported?

- are plenty of modifications available? Is it easy to get help if you have problems or need assistance modifying the software?

[Bradley]

I'm a moderator at Infopop if that counts, so is Charles Capps (well he works for them)

[dank]

Would your data be easy to migrate to another product if you had to?
While I agree that the future of the chosen product is important, I would say that the actual product is a distant second in importance in that respect to the format it stores its data. What I mean is that a database driven forum will be fairly easy to convert in the future (assuming you are going to another true database system), seeing as how you just construct whatever db lookups you need, but a flatfile system can be quite tricky to work with. In which case, vB or phpBB would rate rather highly and UBB and IkonBoard probably not so well.

The reason I comment on this is that I just finished a converter for Discus to phpBB. Pulling code from its original flatfile format was a real pain in the you know what (as best I can tell, no one else has publicly put together a converter for the 3.1+ Discus format), but reassembling it into MySQL was a breeze. Going the other way would be similarly easy, except that it would be a nightmare to get it back into its flatfile system...

From what I've read, vB does a very good job with its UBB import. Non-vB'ers have reported lots of problems trying to do the same.

So, take this convoluded post not so much as a product recommendation, rather a bit of advice that if future product changes (as opposed to version upgrades) may enter the picture, choose a system that will make it less painful. The final decision may well be the same, but the process of getting there could be quite different.

Dan

[PaulKroll]

I've been unable to reach http://www.phpbb.com for a couple of days, but the development is being hosted on Sourceforge, and the last announcement was from the 10th, so whatever is causing the Home Page to be down is likely temporary.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpbb/

[dank]

Good point. They've hosted the development/discussion on the SourceForge site for a while now because phpBB.com was being shut off periodically due to too much bandwidth usage. That problem's been acting up again the past few days, so it's good to have the URL handy of the SourceForge site. The link directly to the forum is:

http://phpbb.sourceforge.net/phpBB/

Dan

[Tibbits]

Originally posted by brnoe:
I'm a moderator at Infopop if that counts, so is Charles Capps (well he works for them)

Ah! yes, that's the bloke I was thinking of. Have to admit I don't post on scriptkeeper anymore after an incident last year:(