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Posted

Hi there, 

I am interesting in starting a message board for music to go along with the Sunday radio shows.   I don't know, it could be embarrassing, the lack of participants or it could help promote things.  

Who hosts this board?   How much does it cost?   Who invented liquid soap and why? 

 

 

 

 

 

(bonus points if you can tell me what movie the last question comes from)

 

  • Like 1
Posted

1. Register your domain name at a domain register.  This will be the address to your site.  Use someone like NameCheap or domain.com.  This will be between $8-$20 per year unless you use an expensive domain like .io.  .com should be fairly cheap.

2. Buy hosting to host the forum.  This includes the disk space to house your software and a certain amount of data/bandwidth per month.  Host Gator is a good cheap hosting company.  I believe you can host sites for as low as $3 a month.  If your forum becomes popular and you draw a lot of traffic you will have to upgrade your hosting to include more bandwidth.

3. Install your forum software.  The best paid software is probably VBulletin and the best free is probably phpBB.  I have no clue what VBulletin costs.

That is basically it, other than learning how the software works.  So if you pick the free forum software you can do it for under $100 a year to start out.

Posted (edited)

not a fan of vBulletin. Xenforo is an improved offshoot of it. and of course I really like Invision Community (this software), but I wouldn't be surprised if it were more expensive than vBulletin/Xenforo.

most commercial forum software will have a cloud-hosted solution from the company that produces it, if you're not into running your own stuff. but obviously that's going to be extra money as well.

Edited by Crazy Cat Gentleman
Posted

Probably your best bet is just make a subreddit on Reddit.  You can still moderate it and they take care of all the software and hosting stuff for free.  

Whatever way you decide to go, I highly recommend you take the time to register whatever you name it with all the social media sites.  Maybe you never do anything with Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or TikTok.  But you don't want other people registering the name and posting on it as you.

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

Some information about this site:

  1. This site is hosted on a virtual private server from LiquidWeb, a hosting company located in Lansing, MI.  I have used them for probably 15+ years now. Great service.
  2. Hosting costs have varied over the years, from a couple hundred a month when traffic levels were high (2007-2017) and lots of bandwidth was needed (on our own private server), to about $50 a month now on a multi-year agreement for a smaller shared server.
  3. Software used for this site is Invision Community.  We used vBulletin for many, many years, but I grew tired of it and had difficulties maintaining it at times.  I've had much better success with Invision and find it to be a much more polished program.  However, it does cost more than vBulletin, which I still have a lifetime paid license to use.  I'd rather pay yearly renewals for Invision at this point.

Starting a new message board today would be really difficult in my opinion.  Trends have changed and social media has made it tough for this type of community to grow and stay alive.  We're here today basically because way back in time we were once part of something much larger (the Detroit Tigers official website) and were able to use that to build a very loyal community which continues on today, despite many changes and moves over the years.  Without that, we wouldn't be here.

Posted

Hmmm... did this movie have a Gary Cooper who wanted to sing show tunes? 

I haven't looked too closely, but with the, er, challenges on Twitter lately some people are talking about a social media site called Mastodon. It looks like you start groups of people with similar interests. I don't know if it would meet your needs, but might be worth a look if you want something to try out.

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