How much does a forum cost to run?

[Richdog]

Can anyone with experience please tell me how much could as an average ballpark figure I can expect a forum to cost to run? Lets say for example a forum with 25% of the traffic and concurrent users as OCUK?

I did some googling and figures seem to vary wildly so if anyone has some practical experience that would be great. It would also be an old Vbulletin forum that needs upgrading to something like Xenforo.

 

[Richdog]

I would go for https://krystal.io/hosting/business (Emerald) - I'd be surprised if you need anything more for a long while.

I started Forever Gaming about 11 years ago now, the hosting is something like £25 a month, the annual licence for the software is £150 last time I checked (could be £200) and the addons and plugins all add a few quid to the total. Occasionally we hire people to help with little niggles and bugs as a result of software updates not going according to plan. The costs for these range from a case of beer to £500.

You could start a forum on a basic hosting package from as little as £6 per month. Once the forum starts getting more popular, you may need to pay more for additional disk space and bandwidth. Then you'd have the forum software licence on top, but I'm sure there are open source solutions available.

The main "cost" for operating a forum will be your time, as the software needs frequent updates and maintenance, and the forum moderation is demanding unless you can get volunteers.

You can find a list of web hosting companies here. You would just need a basic package to begin with. If you are going for PHP/MySQL/cPanel then I would recommend Clook who have been very good for me.

Short answer is that it depends on a massive number of factors.

You can run a forum like this with hyper aggressive page caching on a slower / cheaper server, and have it work acceptably 'most' of the time, but glitch out under times of heavy load.

Your next challenge is backups.
Assuming the host has these or relying on RAID is lunacy (RMWeb which is somewhat larger than here & backed by a major publishing company to boot) had a major data loss incident c. 18 months ago.

Troubleshooting as noted above.
Anything this size will have script kiddies all over it in a rash, all poking for any hole they can find.

Plenty more I haven't though of off the top of my head.
Sure you can skimp on everything, but sooner or later it bites you hard....

Thanks guys I really appreciate the pointers and will bear them in mind. The forum is an existing one thats been abandoned by the previous owners so some of the community are looking to take over it and preserve the data and community.