Operating a forum

[CougTek]

My young cousin (I could very well be his uncle) studied computer sciences and he has ok programming skills. He also is a gaming addict and he wants to start a forum where he and his kiddo friends can brag about how much l33t they are (I know even know what freaking game they're playing). Apparently, they are close to a hundred together.

He asked me how much it would cost to run a web site and a forum to host their community. I've no idea. I think he's after something like we had here at our beginning, with a front page AND a forum in background.

So what would be best for him? PHPBB, VBulletin or something else? How much do they cost? Assuming a hundred players membership, what storage space they need and what kind of bandwidth? I assume they'll have similar to twice our posting volume. I doubt they'll last more than five years though. People eventually grow up.

 

[snowhiker]

There are a bunch of free forums out there that he could setup and run (google "free forums") it would be a good way to get started and to find out if he really needs something that costs money.

 

[Handruin]

Any cheap hosting company that supports one of the LAMP stacks will suffice for that kind of load. They can get an account on dreamhost or something inexpensive. I think Mercutio has been really happy with his account there. I would say phpbb or simple machines forum would work good as a free solution. If they have cash to spend, vbulletin might make for some nice features, but I doubt it's worth the $200 USD. They could migrate later to it if they start with phpbb.

In terms of space, I think they should be fine for a while even with 100 members. Our current database size uncompressed is about 240MB which comprises 158K posts and almost 8900 threads and 768 members, of which we probably only have a dozen who post. Bandwidth I'm not sure about. I would speculate on the conservative side of 8-10GB/month.

If he wants to do a front page for basic information, he could create a wordpress blog that is manageable. Then create a URL on the main page to the forum. it's not a clean integration of forum and blog, but it's a free solution. There may even be a mod to integrate the two log in systems they your cousin could hack with since he is studying computer science.

 

[CougTek]

So worst case :

• 200$ for the software
• hosting plan with 10GB/month bandwidth and 250MB of storage

Dreamhost VPS plan at 15$/month seems to cover all the hosting needs.


Thanks.