• Notice regarding image hosts and attachments. See here.

Forum hosting?

DampDog

DampDog

DampDog

Soldato
Joined
19 Oct 2010
Posts
2,683
Location
North Staffs
Just out of interest really, what sort of cost are involved with running a forum?

I assume the more features you want the more you pay?
 
host can be as cheap as 3quid/month

vbulletin license is over 100 if i remember correctly, but there's a tone of free boards :)

and honestly unless you have an awesome idea chances of it actually picking up and being active are REALLY slim ;) think about it.
 
Phpbb and Punbb are good free forum software.
You need to buy a domain and hosting which can be had very cheap.
New forums often pay a lot of people money to post to make the forum seem active, it's quite hard to start a forum unless you already have an active website.
 
It depends on your user base.

Say you never have any more than 30 concurrent active users, you could get away with typical shared hosting. Costs around £20-50 per year depending on bandwidth limit. Shared hosting could have anywhere between 10-20 people sharing the same server hardware.

If you have around 100 concurrent users you could get away with a Virtual Private Server. These cost about £20-40 per month. These servers usually only have 4 people sharing it.

If you regularly handle 500-1000+ users (like OcUK), you need to have Dedicated Hosting. Minimum £100 per month.
 
biggest cost is not in ££'s it is in the time keeping them clean, there is a large moderator base here that keeps it clean, but spammers and trolls can be the bane of your life on a forum if you are the only moderator!
 
asim18 said:
It depends on your user base.

Say you never have any more than 30 concurrent active users, you could get away with typical shared hosting. Costs around £20-50 per year depending on bandwidth limit. Shared hosting could have anywhere between 10-20 people sharing the same server hardware.

If you have around 100 concurrent users you could get away with a Virtual Private Server. These cost about £20-40 per month. These servers usually only have 4 people sharing it.

If you regularly handle 500-1000+ users (like OcUK), you need to have Dedicated Hosting. Minimum £100 per month.
Click to expand...

Just an FYI but the user tab at the bottom saying you have 500-1000 users doesn't mean you're using 500-1000 concurrent connections. I believe the standard of that is users who've done something in the last 5 minutes, but it could easily be any number of minutes.

asim18 said:
Shared hosting could have anywhere between 10-20 people sharing the same server hardware.
Click to expand...

More like between 100-1000 in reality. Where did you get the number 10-20 from?
 
Administrator for a large gaming forum.

We average around 150 active users at any one time raising to 400~ at peak times, 2000+ average unique visitors per day. Costs us around $140/month in hosting fees (american based dedicated server) but the initial vBulletin license cost around $200 I believe.

Ad revenue easily covers monthly costs. any subscriptions(donations) are paid towards plugins and forum skins along with advertising elsewhere.
 
aln said:
Just an FYI but the user tab at the bottom saying you have 500-1000 users doesn't mean you're using 500-1000 concurrent connections. I believe the standard of that is users who've done something in the last 5 minutes, but it could easily be any number of minutes.



More like between 100-1000 in reality. Where did you get the number 10-20 from?
Click to expand...

I never said anything about concurrent connections - I'm aware that's something totally different. I said "concurrent users". And it's showing 2009 users right now, so that could easily be 500 right now, as you said it's something like in the last 5 mins or so.


Also I should have said "10-20 depending on host" Yes if you go to a certain host they could have 100-1000 users, I agree that's not impossible to find.
 
Last edited:
asim18 said:
I never said anything about concurrent connections - I'm aware that's something totally different. I said "concurrent users". And it's showing 2009 users right now, so that could easily be 500 right now, as you said it's something like in the last 5 mins or so.


Also I should have said "10-20 depending on host" Yes if you go to a certain host they could have 100-1000 users, I agree that's not impossible to find.
Click to expand...

I'm aware what you said I was just clarifying because the distinction between concurrent users and concurrent connections is unclear in my opinion. Both mean "at the same time" when in reality what you're actually talking about is not concurrent at all and I doubt there is 500 conncurrent connections opened on the site. Standard apache is probably still hardcoded to a 250 in most server distros and I suspect there isn't even 100 on a regular basis but I wouldn't really know, depends on the config.

Also while it's possible you can be on a shared host with only 10-20 people, I was pointing out that I believe it's extremely unlikely. When you're selling hosting at £2.99 a month, I doubt hosting 20 sites is really paying the datacentre / hardware fees, never mind the staff. You will much more likely be sharing with the numbers I quoted and that's why shared hosting is so crap, there are _that_ many folks who'll be trying to break the server you're not and it takes quite a bit of admining talent to stop that.
 
Thanks folks, it was just something I was curious about. Apart from the actual monetary cost it looks like the other key ingredient is having enough like minded people to help with the moderation and general day to day admin/anti-spam and such.

I think I'll stick with dipping in and out of the forums with the content that interests me, and leave it at that. Cheers;)
 
DampDog said:
Thanks folks, it was just something I was curious about. Apart from the actual monetary cost it looks like the other key ingredient is having enough like minded people to help with the moderation and general day to day admin/anti-spam and such.
Click to expand...
Spam is easy to stop if you know how. Usually something that needs a bit of intelligence to 'solve' is enough to fox automated registrations. Pretty much all of the wobbly letter stuff has been beaten.

Moderation depends on the kind of board and what it's used for. I've got a 15,000 member board that only 3 of us look after. Likewise I'm on a 300 member board that has about 6-7 moderators due to the way it's laid out and how it functions. I tend to find if you're fair with the users, they behave themselves and don't usually need much controlling.

The main rule is not to have anyone in the team who ASKED to be a moderator. They're usually control freak nutters. You should be able to identify the ones who are right. It's fairly easy to run the board yourself for the first 6-12 months depending on new member uptake though.
 
sports_brah said:
I'm sure the forums here actually MAKE ocuk a great of money. :)
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure the last time this was discussed it was made clear these forums run at a loss. There are competitors to OcUK who don't have a forum but are just as successful. Although the interaction with the community that OcUK gets will be valuable information with regards to stock and market trends they could still make heaps of money without this forum. If it make OcUK money then they would be paying the Dons for their service ;)
 
desires said:
I'm pretty sure the last time this was discussed it was made clear these forums run at a loss. There are competitors to OcUK who don't have a forum but are just as successful. Although the interaction with the community that OcUK gets will be valuable information with regards to stock and market trends they could still make heaps of money without this forum. If it make OcUK money then they would be paying the Dons for their service ;)
Click to expand...

It's fairly easy to claim the forums run at a loss, the subdomain won't bring in any money but I doubt they'd be running them if they didn't think they helped. I imagine if you added the profits made from people with free delivery, then subtracted the forum costs, you'd come out with a net positive, otherwise we'd have lost that feature. :)
 
desires said:
I'm pretty sure the last time this was discussed it was made clear these forums run at a loss. There are competitors to OcUK who don't have a forum but are just as successful. Although the interaction with the community that OcUK gets will be valuable information with regards to stock and market trends they could still make heaps of money without this forum. If it make OcUK money then they would be paying the Dons for their service ;)
Click to expand...

Of course the forums run at a loss :p the forums aren't selling anything and there is no advertising revenue.

But that doesn't mean the Shop website doesn't get shedloads of customers from various forum promotions/forwarding/spec me etc.

I've personally specced several people several things on the shop from the forums and they've gone and bought it.

Does that mean the forum made money, no.
Does it mean OcUK made a sale because of the forum, yes.
 
I ran a forum once and getting it setup was fine, but there's a lot more work than you think to running it and keeping it active. It was working out at around £80/year for it all which was not bad, but managing it and getting new members was very tiresome.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom