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Interested to put up your own forum online? Well if so, consider using phpBB.

About phpBB

phpBB is an affordable (and yet professional supported) community forum solution. There are thousands of forums have vBulletin as it fits almost any size of online community. Since its creation in 2000, phpBB has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB 3.0 “Olympus” has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes.

Why setup a forum for your website?

As you might already knew, making your site a hub for information is important to win repeating visitors. Setting up a forum also It’s also a highly effective way of improving your service to customers or users of your website.

phpBB at Bluehost

At Bluehost, you can get phpBB via auto installation at Fantastico and SimpleScripts. The version offered at current time of writing is v3.0.4. Check out print screen below – it’s the phpBB installation page at SimpleScripts.

Nowadays not only blogging are popular among individual Internet users.

With the help of cheap web hosting and open source, even forums owned by individual webmaster are getting more and more active.

Topics like computer, entertainment, science, technology, automobile and politics are brought into forum for open discussion among surfers and enthusiasts.

Are you interested in starting your own forum?

Hosting a successful forum is not as hard as it used to be – at least from the technical point of view, it’s very much achievable for individual webmaster to launch and maintain their own forums.

There are a lot of factors which making a forum to be well known and successful but we are here to focus on the key factor, which will be the web hosting.

This is why many web hosting companies were being set up to provide different services to people. It is a bit difficult for us to select which one will be the best in term of cost and features given. Details study and analysis on them are essential for make everything perfect!

Following are some of the key points which maybe helpful for you to make your choice:

Web Space

Web space is the storage capacity provided by web hosting company for you to store data in the internet. When we study on this point, of cause the bigger web space supplied, the more easier and flexible for us to manage and store our data.

Out of so many web hosting companies in the world, there are plenty of suppliers which can offering mass web space with affordable price. Bluehost, for example, provide unlimited hosting capacity (and bandwidth and addon domains) in their shared hosting plan. Such features allow website owners more flexibility in handling their forums.

Free web application software

Your choice with Bluehost allow you to host with adequate MySQL , DBs and phpMyAdmin. Further more, Bluehost latest featured on Simple Scripts allow webmasters to install forum software in just a few clicks. These are useful features as it minimize the technical knowledge requirement for hosting and managing a discussion board.

In fact, I believe that the reason behind forum hosting has turned much popular compare to before is because of the development of these open-sourced forum software.

Here’s a view on the forum scripts available at Bluehost.

Server uptime

It’s basic requirement for a web host to offer reliable hosting server. You do not want your forum member’s connection to the server cut off middle in a heated discussion, don’t you?

There are quite a log of web hosting companies claim that they are offering 99% uptime, but be careful – some of these are nothing more than marketing gimmic and they just can’t deliver such much of uptimeservice.

Server uptime, in fact, is the main reason why am I suggesting Bluehost. In case you followed my previous post about Bluehost server status, you should be aware that Bluehost provide respectable server uptime thru out the years I’m with them.

Support

Almost every web hosting company does come with supports or more know as after sales services. As similar to the point 5, this can checked through forums too.

The better the supports provided the fewer headaches you will face. Thus, you can spend more time to develop your forum.

So is Bluehost recommended for forum hosting?

Well, the straight and direct answer is yes.

Listed above are just some of the opinions which may help you to select a web hosting company – which I would recommend Bluehost based on the listed requirements.

Interested to learn more on what Bluehost has to offer? Check out my detail reviews on Bluehost hosting features.

Yes, it’s very much possible to host a popular forum on Bluehost, even if you’re just using their shared hosting account. In fact, there’s no reason why you should go ‘dedicated’ (server) when you first start your forum.

Bluehost already have all the features you need for hosting a forum and I don’t see why, for a startup forum needs the whole server dedicated as its host. Instead, save some money for promotional expenses. You can have unlimited bandwidth and disk storage at Bluehost – so what’re you waiting for? Go flood your website with unlimited traffics.

Okay, back to Bluehost. Bluehost offers forum script like vbulletin or phbb2. Hosting a forum with these scipts is simple. The installation (via Fantastico or Simple Scripts) is almost instant, the forum maintenance can be all done with web application. In fact I used to have a forum running on Bluehost (using vBulletin) and everything goes so well, expect that I can get enough members to make the forum useful.

Installing a forum at Bluehost

So here’s how you can install a forum at your website.

Get to Fantastico or Simple Script based on your own preference. There’re two forum scripts with Fantastico, which is phpBB and SMF; and three forum scripts available with Simple Scripts, which isphpBB, PunBB, and BBPress.

Take phpBB on Fantastico as our example, to select installation for phpbb forum, simply click on the installation link and Fantastico will guide you through the installation process. Fill up a few details like Forum names and URL; the installation process should be completed within seconds.

Simple as that.

“Is it okay to host a forum using shared hosting plan?”

People like to ask me questions when they knew that I’m in web business. The question like above is one of the most that I answered, and the answer is yes.

Do not get scared by the word ‘forum’. Although running a popular forum (imagine massive comment moderation plus spam issues plus user management plus…) can be a pretty tough job for a newbie; starting of a forum on your website, however is very easy.

With the help of Simple Script, installing a forum software at your hosting can be done in no time

Take example of PHPBB installation, all you need to is to click on the icon, key in the details for your forum (like title and admin logins) and the system will creates the database and install the forum software on your server for you. The process is pretty straight forward and direct.

More over, there’re more than just PHPBB to be installed.

You can get PHPBB, BB Press, and PUN BB using Simple Script; get SMF and PHP BB using Fantastico – all these are available when you subscribe to ANY BlueHost hosting plan.

Advantages with hosting forum at BlueHost

The good thing about hosting forum at BlueHost is that the company offers unlimited disk storage and bandwidth transfer on their shared hosting plan. That means you can run your forum without worrying about the traffic surge on your hosting. With just $6.95/mo, you’ll get all the resources you need for hosting a popular forum.