How can I setup my own forum?

April 11th, 2007 by Connie

Well there are few options and it really depends on your skills and what you currently have.Three options:

1. Use a hosted forum (free or paid)
2. Add a forum to your existing site.
3. Find a web hosting company that you can set up your forum and later other features you may want

1. Use a Hosted Forum

This is by far the easiest way. The forum hosting company installs, sets up and upgrades your forum as needed. Administrating the forum is probably easy also. The downside of this type of forum may be advertising or limitations. Limitations may be in the forum that you can’t have ads/banner on your website or limited number of styles/themes (the look) to your forum. You can always upgrade to the paid version and limitations are reduced.

I have provided some links of some popular free forum hosting but I have never tried them.

• http://www.freeforums.org/
• http://www.forumspring.com/
• http://www.talkthis.com/

Incorporating a forum into existing website:

If you already have website, see what your host provides for forums.

• Many hosts offer setup of specific forum packages so see what your host offers.
• Another option is to create a hosted forum as suggested above and just link to that forum from your website. That isn’t as nicely contained but it would be easy.
• Or you can setup your own forum and that information is same as the next option so see below.

Find a Web Host and start your own website with forum:

How to choose a Host:

This is by far one of the hardest things to do. I spent quite a bit of time searching and found a lot of information. As with most products, the unhappy people are the most vocal about the product so it feels like this host is bad or that host is bad. In the end I chose GoDaddy (reasons: cheap, large, reliable, and easy to register my domain.)

First thing you need to decide in choosing a host is what is most important to you.

• Price
• Bandwidth which is the amount of data that can be transferred. If you exceed the bandwidth, the host charges extra or your site goes down.
• Disk space, this is the amount of room that you have on the host for everything.

And other things that can’t really be determined until you use it:

• Upload/Download time which is how fast the server is.
• Customer Service
• Uptime/Downtime Downtime is how often the servers are inaccessible. You want Uptime to be close to 100%.
• Security

This is a simple updated list of top hosting companies: Best Web Hosting 2007

I liked this person’s method of finding a host: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=530676

An important thing to look for when you are choosing Hosts is see what packages/tools they install for you. (By packages/tools I mean software that runs forums, blogs, shopping carts, galleries, etc.) This will make life a lot more easy for you if they install it. So what packages/tools do you need? Well today we are discussing forums, so I will give you some popular choices.

The free to use forums: by far the most popular are these 2 choices:

• www.invisionboard.com
• www.phpbb.com

Best Purchased Forum is www.vbulletin.com

I will give you hint about choosing forums, as you move around websites reading forums, go to the very bottom. The forum package name being used is at the very bottom. DigiShopTalk uses vBulletin. We use phpbb. The reason they all look different is the style/theme of the forum. Packaged or customized styles/themes can be added to the free or purchased forums. Many times a specific style can be found that matches closely. If you want to start customizing, be prepared to learn html and other coding.

Once you have web host chosen, you go through their process of creating an account. If you have chosen well, the web host should provided a good documentation and help to guide you through the process. GoDaddy gave me a 55 page getting started guide. Along with this process is choosing a domain name. A domain name is simply what appears after www. I think this took Connie and I hours to decide. (Connie’s note – yep! until our husbands got sick of helping & when they started giving inappropriate ones, we knew it was time to decide!)

In setting up your own website with a forum you will learn as you go. It is also time consuming.

Connie asked me to write this blog entry and I feel like I have only touched upon it. I could type for hours of all the things you need to do, look for, etc. They are many resources are the web that are useful in doing this. You just need to search for them. So if you are interested in starting your forum, hopefully I gave you enough information to ponder the idea and point you in the right direction.