• Welcome to The Cave of Dragonflies forums, where the smallest bugs live alongside the strongest dragons.

    Guests are not able to post messages or even read certain areas of the forums. Now, that's boring, don't you think? Registration, on the other hand, is simple, completely free of charge, and does not require you to give out any personal information at all. As soon as you register, you can take part in some of the happy fun things at the forums such as posting messages, voting in polls, sending private messages to people and being told that this is where we drink tea and eat cod.

    Of course I'm not forcing you to do anything if you don't want to, but seriously, what have you got to lose? Five seconds of your life?

Do you, or would you, pay for hosting?

I pay $8/mo for my hosting as the free hosting accounts were not able to tolerate my high bandwidth consumption and the free hosts kept closing or whatnot. It really depends how much time and effort you can dedicate to running a site, and whether you'd like to spend your pocket money on such a thing. A basic, 5-page website, will not need paid hosting, for example.

I would be very keen to purchase a vbulletin board for my site, but for now, until my googleads generate enough revenue, I'll do fine with a free SMF forums which seems to suit my small forum community quite well.

You simply need to consider each situation, it's pros and cons, on an individual basis I guess.
 
I was planning on buying a vB license and starting up a forum a few years ago, Mew's Hangout crashed shortly after so I offered MK if she wanted to use the license. I don't think the money is a problem, especially if you can get enough traffic coming in.

If there's low traffic, there's very little point spending money, especially if you're not going to be making any back.


Just out of curiousity, how many people in a "small forum community", and what's the peak amount of people on at one time?
 
vB is pretty terrible, though. Here, the problem's more that the server is lame, but vB itself can't possibly be helping.

Have you ever gone through the mod/admin CPs for vB? They're pretty sad.
 
Honestly, they're just confusing until you get used to them. :/ Like any other admin CP out there, pretty much. And how many times do I have to tell you that the forum software has absolutely nothing to do with the server troubles?
 
Felidire said:
I was planning on buying a vB license and starting up a forum a few years ago
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not worth it, especially for starting out a forum. It might not be successful and then you've just blown off over $100 on a dead forum. Hell, there's Free Software forum scripts that do the job just as well as vB can.

best to use a Free Software script and then migrate over to vB if grows to the point where it's actually worth investing in

edit: I am proud to say I pay $30/month for cheap VPS hosting, which gives me much more leeway in what I can actually do with my hosting account than a shared host.
 
I am more than happy (and able) to pay for hosting, however I don't need to as someone is willing to host me. However, if the situation was to change for whatever reason, I would just pay for my own host, instead of going out to find someone else to host me.

With forums, I too, was contemplating buying a vB licensce for an upcoming project, but one of my friends are currently in the process of coding a forum system which from what I've seen so far is far better than vBulletin.
 
I just changed my host (so I could update without having to change internet connections), and now I only pay £9.98 every 2 years for unlimited bandwith :)
 
Number 100 said:
not worth it, especially for starting out a forum. It might not be successful and then you've just blown off over $100 on a dead forum. Hell, there's Free Software forum scripts that do the job just as well as vB can.
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*shrug* I've always been one to skip the preliminaries, I like to start big; like when I got a guitar, I learned hammer-on/slides/mutes/vibrato/how to read tabs before I even knew the most basic things(I still don't know them). xD

I think it was only around $200. I had tried some of the other free stuff, but I never got used to it, it felt.. uncomfortable to use, if that makes any sense. I'd rather get comfortable using vB, because that's what i'd be using in the long run.
 
I think you should just pay. Free web hosting isn't that good. They make you have a sub domain name,ads all over the place, limited space, won't show up when you search for it, may only allow HTML and CSS, and most likely won't have something interesting like a chatbox or forum.
 
it's possible to find decent hosting without advertising; sure, space is limited, but you'd have limited space with pair hosting, too. subdomains aren't actually that bad, and I'd think that most would let you use your own domain if you have one. I can't think of any major hosts that don't support at least php? and I have no idea what you mean by won't show up when you search.

it sounds like you've only been able to find some really crappy hosts. I ran this search some time ago and have no idea what it's actually searching for, but it looks like an okay list.

and if the interesting parts are the chatbox and forums, something has gone horribly wrong.
 
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