Today it seems like more and more people are finding their way to the world wide web, and starting blogs, websites, and forums. Forums in particular can be a great way to establish a “community.” It allows for easy posting and sharing of ideas, views, and more.
How to Start a Website Forum for Free
If you want to start a forum, the first thing you will need is an actual forum script. After all, if you don’t have the software (script) to run a forum, you can never have one!
The great news is that there are a few scripts that are totally free, very user friendly, and very stable. These are available for a free download, and you can begin using them immediately. Also, you can use them for as many forums or websites that you want!
PHPBB is one of the great scripts that have been around for quite a while. It is very stable, and there are several tweaks you can add to customize it to suit your needs. It is also an open source script, meaning that not only is it free, but you can customize or add coding to it as your site grows or your design needs change.
Simple Machines Forum is also another great script, and in my opinion probably the best free website forum script there is right now. There is great support, lots of plugins, and it works very well. I have used it on one of my sites for over a year, and it works great.
There are also many proprietary (costs money) scripts out there. Vbulletin is probably the most popular, and it too works great. If your forum grows to a massive size and generates a lot of revenue, you may want to eventually upgrade to a paid version. But it is completely optional, and to be honest, the other (free) scripts work almost just as well.
Getting Hosting & a Domain Name for Your Forum
Starting a website forum is a great way to build an online community, and possibly even earn an extra income. While there are totally free scripts out there, you may want to invest a small amount of money into a domain name and hosting plan.
A domain is the “.com” that you will have for your site. They generally cost as little as $9.99 for a one year registration period. I use Godaddy.com to manage my domains, and I would highly recommend them.
You will also want to get a “hosting plan,” which is simply a server which you can rent a portion of the space on to keep your site live at all times. They too are very inexpensive for the shared hosting plans, and cost as little as $4.99 per month. I also use Godaddy.com for this, although there are tons of other great hosting companies as well.
In conclusion, starting a forum is easy. Grab a free script, get a domain and hosting plan, upload the script to your site (there are usually instructions on the forum script page on how to install & upload it), and bam, you now have your own website forum!
Sponsored Links
Posted under Website Tips, design, scripts
This post was written by Ben on May 31, 2009
