Forum Hosting Services

[Neo-Scholastic]

Please help me select an appropriate online forum hosting service or similar solution.

I serve on my Co-Op board. I think the board would greatly benefit from a private forum space in which to discuss and debate issues related to our building...something similar to AF. I'm thinking the board would be the mods, committees could discuss in restricted areas like area69, and shareholders could bring up matters important to them.

What would you technical minded people advise? Free or paid hosting? Most board members like me are not all that savvy so customer service is important too.

I'm also curious about the ability to have multiple administrators since board membership changes. When a board member resigns etc.

[KevinM1]

Please help me select an appropriate online forum hosting service or similar solution.

I serve on my Co-Op board. I think the board would greatly benefit from a private forum space in which to discuss and debate issues related to our building...something similar to AF. I'm thinking the board would be the mods, committees could discuss in restricted areas like area69, and shareholders could bring up matters important to them.

What would you technical minded people advise? Free or paid hosting? Most board members like me are not all that savvy so customer service is important too.

I'm also curious about the ability to have multiple administrators since board membership changes. When a board member resigns etc.

In my experience, free hosting is utter shit.  Random downtime, restrictions on various things, unwanted ads inserted into your pages, etc.

For small projects, I use paid shared hosting from ICDSoft.  It's ~$6.00/month, maybe more.  Linux hosting, I believe it's the full LAMP stack, but they may use Nginx rather than Apache (running PHP scripts is seamless, so you don't really need to worry about it), you can get SSH access if you send in a support ticket after you buy.  Good control panel, no hidden upcharges or fees or any shenanigans.  I've never experienced any downtime with them, even after hosting several sites with them for almost a decade.

Should more than fit your needs.

[account_inactive]

DigitalOcean. Install forum software on that.

[Jackalope]

@Chad

Do you have a budget? The thing about customer service on low cost services is that "customer service" amounts to rebooting or reimaging your server. If you're going to run a forum,, you're going to need to have someone familiar with the software stack out of necessity. With a small number of participants an email based service might suit your needs.

Free services are gwneally worth every penny you pay for it.

[Jackalope]

P.S. I have used linode.com, Amazon, and Dreamhost recently. I would not recommend the latter.

[Ryantology]

I used SiteTurn to host my old forum, Tendo City. Decent and cheap for the minimally rigorous use that forum required. I gave the forum away, but the new owner still hosts with them. They've been the site's host for 13 years.

[Aoi Magi]

Use DigitalOcean, they are cheap, scalable, flexible and very easy to use. I love their flexibility and amount of control they give me over every aspect of the hosting process. I have also used M$ Azure, Amazon, Bluehost, GoDaddy, and a ton of others but I'd still recommend digitalocean over all others.

[Goosebump]

I use Host Gator (aka: Bluehost) and never had an issue. But if Aoi Magi is recommending DigitalOcean, with no conflict of interest, then I'd take her at her word.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Great suggestions. Thank you. I may go for the paid route eventually, but I want to try out the concept first.

[bennyboy]

I don't know if any of the results, but I googled:

"Free forum hosting"

and got things like
https://www.proboards.com/
http://www.zetaboards.com/
https://www.phpbb.com/hosting/



These sites would save you from having to really do any programming of your own, and you can probably have a working forum in a couple of minutes.