Forum Hosting Advice?

TheHel1x · August 2, 2018

I just launched a website on wordpress and I am looking for recommendations for what forum program to use and where to host it.

I don't have much of a budget as this is just a hobby for a college student but I would like to see what you guys and girls have to say and suggest.

Thank you!

mariushm · August 2, 2018

Just look at the top 10-50 forums out there and at the bottom of the pages you should see what forum software is used for them.

You can use anything, from free stuff like Simple Machines Forum (SMF) to more commercial stuff.

It depends also on who's going to use your forum, what's the target.. a more technical audience like let's say circuit designers engineers etc may not care about the forum software because they care about content more (see for example EEVBlog forum which uses free SMF forum software) but for other purposes you may prefer more complex forum scripts for features like signatures, avatars, bling etc ... for example if you want to attract a younger crowd which cares about that, like what's here on this forum.

You can start a forum even on a 1-2$ per month shared hosting account, and you can move it to something more professional once you get a lot of members and page views. Forums do a significant amount of database queries, so the higher the member and viewer count, the more the database server will be loaded, and in a shared hosting environment you will see you forum start to become slower once the number of members goes up (and the number of posts).

ChuckMaurice · August 7, 2018

What you need:

A domain name (www.mydomainname.com). Usually around $15/year, but may be included in your hosting.
A server to host the website (that will run Linux). The best way is to rent one. I can recommend DigitalOcean if you are in the US/CA as it simplify a lot of steps but is highly customisable. Prices starts at $5/month. Maybe you could also host it alongside your Wordpress website, depending on what you already have.
A forum software installed on this server. I find Discourse to be among the best free forum software I tried. Can be complicated to set up though if you haven't any experience hosting (especially with Docker). Fortunately there's tons of tutorials online.