Free Forums Hosting??

[Aminka Ozmun]

Hi, Folks,

Just curious why anyone would offer to host people's forums and guestbooks for free, free of ads. Is this a good solution?

I am currently shopping for a webhost for my first-ever site and believe in having forums eventually. However, the two top options I'm considering don't offer forums "natively" -- they must be integrated somehow, such as via a subdomain.

Seems like such a clunky workaround but I haven't found the perfect combination of price and feature-set so it looks like this is how it has to be!

Thanks for your thoughts!

[James81]

Try Hostgator or Bluehost. I've had both and both are great (and well priced).

[Merrick1]

I am very happy with MDD Hosting. It might not be that well-known but they are very fast and reliable.

Merrick

[Lil Chris]

It's most likely because a forum with decent traffic needs to perform well. Take this forum, it needs to sit on a dedicated server due to it's traffic. You wont need that to start out, but a shared server environment might make a forum a bit dodgy in performance with moderate traffic (depends on the server and other factors).

Also, most shared environments don't allow you root access to make the necessary changes you'll need. With that said, you can utilize other forum software which isn't as robust as say vbulletin (vbulletin isn't free software btw), on any website that you've got. You don't need to run it in a subdomain, but sometimes it's beneficial to.

What is your budget and what are you looking for? Do you have or need tech support for your project? Is your project at a professional level (ie. business) or at the hobby level? I may be able to offer you a custom solution at a reasonable price to suit your needs.