I follow the Iditarod and other long distance sled dog races. I am currently a member of a board/forum that is going to shut down prior to this years Iditarod. The Iditarod Trail Committee (ITC) is going to start a new forum but given their track history running their current site and updates I seriously doubt they will handle the new task very well.
We are a pretty tame yet close knit community. We do have a place to post over at Dogsled.com but is not a very user friendly board; It is powered by FireBoard. I would prefer either phpBB or vBulletin.
The forums would be very active during February and March and a ghost town (except for us die hards) the rest of the year.
Does anyone have any rough estimates of what kinda dough it would take to run a small board/forum?? I can only imagine we would have little to no advertisements/sponsorships.
Any help or information would be greatly appreciated.
Web sites complete with full-blown bulletin boards don’t take much actual cash at all these days. Buying a domain name and having it hosted for the year should cost no more than $100 and could cost less than half that with the right bundle. You won’t be able to use all the space and tools they give you either. phpBB is free with many web space bundles. I have a web site with it and it costs about $80 a year with all the bells and whistles. Setting up a phpBB forum literally only takes an hour or less and is easy even for a novice. I don’t actually use mine but I have screwed around with it and it is simple to use. The main issues are whether you want an actual website around it and whether you need administrators and moderators on your board. You can build a decent looking website with the point and click tools that come with the package. The organization of the board just requires effort.
Thanks Shagnasty one of my friends “in the know” who runs a very large Real Estate appraisers boards suggests a dedicated server. Though that would be nice it seems like a HUGE expense for a board that is only really active two months a year. That being said, those two months (actually the 14+/- days of the race) it would be critical that the site be up and running…will website hosts let you increase/decrease space/bandwidth on a month to month basis?
I seriously doubt you will be able to use the space they give you just through a message board. I get 100 GB of storage and over 1 Terabyte of traffic a month with mine for about $80 a year and I don’t even have that good of a deal. Something like the SDMB would be accommodated by that space many times over. Any reputable provider should approach 100% up time as well and send you daily reports. Anything less that 99% up-time is very unlikely with a reputable provider. Paying for an actual dedicated server hosted somewhere seems like overkill to me with little point. Having your own actual server (like one at your house for instance) is a horrible idea and not worth pursuing from any angle including financial. All of this stuff is almost completely automated. You sign up, a system allocates you the space and tools you ordered and the link to your web interface. You do what you want from there. My provider is www.startlogic.com and they are decent but there is probably something better out there. People always recommend www.godaddy.com on this board and elsewhere.
If you don’t need your own domain, and don’t mind ads (fair warning, some of their ads will start talking to you!) places like Bravenet can set you up with a free message board. Or, for something like $65 a year, they’re ad-free.
Invision Power Board is one of the best ones, in my experience. If you don’t want to pay anything at all for your board, Invisionfree is their free version. It is very customizeable, even the free version, and some free IFs can come out looking better than a For-Pay board, but make sure you have someone who knows what they’re doing touching the Admin controls, otherwise it can look like a bag of ass. A Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is what a lot of IPB designers revolted and created together; it is free I believe, and very powerful.