Discussion forum hosting

I'd steer clear of free hosting, especially for an important project. Surely the project maintainers won't mind spending $10 a month or so on it? You can get reasonable hosting for $5 - 10 a month.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ is the best source of information.

I agree with what Cromulent says. Get some decent hosting (will only cost you a couple of bucks) and you might also want to get yourself a domain name (once again, only a couple of bucks). That way, you have complete control over your forum. You can install whatever forum software you want, configure it exactly how you want, and you won't have annoying ads :). And you have your domain name sitting there ready to rock when you start showing your project off.

As far as forum software goes, PHPBB is probably one of the most popular, as is SMF. Packages like vBulletin are great but fairly costly.

If you have a spare pc laying around, you could also use that for a host. If you're internet costs/power costs allow for it, I'd go with that. There is many tutorials on how to set up a simple server. You'd be looking for packages like php, mysql, apache.

Is this forum going to be just for you and your co-developers, where you discuss the project, or will it also be a user forum? If it's the former, it's even better, because then you don't need a webdomain (saves even more costs). You're co-developers could just save a bookmark to the ip address. Otherwise (or if you don't have a static ip), I think there are services that will give you a subdomain that you can link to your webserver, even if it's not one with a static ip.

Then again, if this is for a more important project, go with some paid webhost, saves you a lot of trouble, and they don't have to be very expensive (5$-10$ were the prizes mentioned before me). If it's something easy and just for you and your co-developers, I'd set up my own little webserver thingamagic.

Thanks for all the replies. There are some very good ideas. Setting up our own box to host is particularly interesting. At this time it will only be a group of developers and testers that actually need to discuss anything, but it is a fairly large and geographically disparate group.

-Kirk

Quote:

Original post by kirkd Setting up our own box to host is particularly interesting. -Kirk

And also will involve a lot of time discussing details with your ISP if they will even allow it. It'd be much easier to just buy a domain. The cost of hosting can't be more than the cost of a new plan with your ISP, and you don't have to worry about setting up the box.

Quote:

Original post by bschneid Quote: Original post by kirkd Setting up our own box to host is particularly interesting. -Kirk And also will involve a lot of time discussing details with your ISP if they will even allow it. It'd be much easier to just buy a domain. The cost of hosting can't be more than the cost of a new plan with your ISP, and you don't have to worry about setting up the box.

Domain != Host

I think it's perfectly fine to allow http access to your own box at home, I've never heard of any restrictions on such a thing. Buying a domain won't make a change either, the ISP really couldn't care less whether you're box is accessed over a bought domain or over a direct ip address or over a routing service like no-ip.com.

The only thing to take in account is that it might be a little troublesome to get the own box to run as you want, but I don't think anyone with enough computer-expertise to dev is going to have major problems there. If you don't want to spend time getting it to work, that's when I would recommend looking for some free hosting with probably a free subdomain.

Also, if it's just a pure simple forum you're after, I used to use rapidforum to set one up. They make it quite easy. I haven't used it for a while, but it is free of costs. If you just want somthing simple so you and your co-dev's can communicate, it might be worth checking out.